How To Design A Website For Matt Cutts and Google Hummingbird

For everyone wondering how to design a website, you had better think about designing that website for Matt Cutts and the latest Google update “Hummingbird”.

I am sure that most of you are wondering “who the heck is Matt Cutts, what does Google have to do with Hummingbirds, and what does this have to do with how to design a website”? Well, I will try to explain.

First, when you think of how to design a website, you need to think about why you are designing a website. You know, is this a website for you and your friends to look at, or are you hoping that people will actually click on your website, find the website design interesting and call or email you about doing business together? If you are designing a website for you and your friends, then you can stop reading here. The rest of this article will be about generating business through your website.

So, if you want to know how to design a website that people will find, you need to know a little about Matt Cutts and Google’s Hummingbird. Matt Cutts is the head of webspam for Google. In other words, Matt is the one deciding what is spam and what is good on the internet. Why should you care about this? Well if Google thinks that your site is likely to be interesting and relevant to the search query someone just entered, your website might actually show up in the search results. There are lots of details in determining if it will show up or not, but the first step is to be considered relevant to the search.

What do I mean by interesting? Well one of the ways that you can measure this is by looking at how people engage with you website. If you designed your website in such a way that people tend to share your articles on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and/or Twitter, then you might consider your site interesting. If people tend to “like” or “+1″ your articles after they are shared on social media; even better.

What do I mean by relevant? A website and one of it’s pages should be specifically talking about whatever people are searching. This is where Google’s Hummingbird comes in. You see, Google used to look at matching the actual exact words on your webpage to the search query. Now it is not about the words on your site matching the search specifically Now Google will actually read your webpage to determine of the article is really relating to the search. Think of it like this: If someone searches for “Hot Apple”, they could be looking for an apple pie recipe or a new iPad. Now you can write out a recipe without actually using the words “Hot” and “Apple” (Granny Smith for example) and yet with Hummingbird Google will see that your sight could match the search query. In the same way, you can talk about iPads for sale without mentioning Apple.

I will not be going into how Google determines which site will show and in what order, but you need to understand a little about how Google is reading your site when you are thinking about how to design that website.

So, bottom line of the short version here, is that if you want people to find your website, you need to write original, relevant and interesting content. You will then need to market that site in a way that Matt Cutts says is not “spammy” or your work will be for nothing (except you and your friends).

Have fun, and if you need more pointers on how to design a website, feel free to drop me a line.