While most of you probably spent your winter holiday sipping egg nog or drinking mulled cider, I spent mine watching a new series of posts to Google Video by Matt Cutts, the master of all things Google. Yes, I have a wife and no … this didn’t amuse her.

One video in particular caught my attention and I thought was worth mentioning here on my website. In it, Matt talks about the qualities of a good site and how to make your website more Google friendly.

I’m posting this here as much for my regular readers as for myself, as an easy reference to some of the best Search Engine Optimization advice I’ve ever heard.

Make your site crawl-able.  That’s really the best advice anybody can give you and if the master of Google repeats it, then you’ve got to believe it. One of the best ways to do this is to try to surf your website as a blind user. If it’s possible for person to surf your website without using graphics (especially Flash) then you’re one step closer to having an indexable site. It’s easy to understand why really, Google is a robot. That might be a surprise to people but all Google does (all day long) is surf the Internet, following link after link and indexing the content … if it can’t see the link (ie it’s hidden in a Flash animation) then Google can’t follow it.

Matt also suggests taking some time to look at your website to make sure that you’ve included a couple of things:

• Site Map
• Quality Content

Quality content? Yes, that’s huge. “Fundimentally, you need something interesting that sets you apart from the pack”. Makes perfect sense really, it’s all about making your website better for people, not Google.