Around Halloween, Google held a online event for webmasters, called Tricks and Treats, complete with Matt Cutts, Adam Lasnik, Maile and other noted Googlers. Some gave quick, right to the point presentations on topics we often question and then about 750 participants from all over the world (some logging on in the middle of the night) got to ask their own questions.

In this unusual format, all the webmaster questions were posted on line and everyone was able to vote questions up and down on the list according to their interests. That way, the questions that were of interest to the most people were addressed, first. However, the Googlers extended their session well past the announced cut off time in order to answer as many as possible and then posted the answers online for everyone to see.  Here are my personal takeaways from this awesome outreach by Google.

Google says:

Don’t worry too much about duplicate content on your own site. Google says they are pretty good at simply ignoring it. (MHO: While it may not hurt, it doesn’t help, so why have it on your site, away? Get rid of it.)

There is no optimal keyword density. Make it readable. (MHO: I thought every webmaster who’s been paying attention since about 2002 knew this. Instead of stuffing the same terms over and over into your text, use synonyms, variations and related terms, just as any good writer would do when explaining something.)

If you use and XML sitemap, keep it up to date. (MHO: Of course, silly rabbit! Any time you add or remove pages a new sitemap should be uploaded. If you don’t, you deserve what you get. You’re probably better off with no XML sitemap than with an incorrect one.)

Websites won’t get better if they are left alone. (MHO: Sooo true. Your competitors are continually improving their websites, so you’d better be, too, or you’ll get left in their dust. And without new, interesting content, what will lure past visitors back to your site? Your website is a work in progress, so you’d better keep working on it.)

Validating your code will not help your website to rank higher. Less than 5% of the pages on the web validate. However, validation will permit your pages to work better on more browsers. This is particularly important in the growing world of Mobile Search, which has it’s own browsers.

There is no limit on the number of 301 redirects you can have on one domain. 301′s DO pass PageRank. It is best to do page by page redirects. (MHO: Google has said elsewhere, however, that chained – or mulitple  - redirects are not favored and should be avoided.)

Videos are good to have on all kinds of websites because they give you the opportunity to present good, compelling content to your visitors. The link text of links pointing to pages without much text on them, like the typical pages videos live on, is critical in telling Google what the page is about.

Google updated their algorithm about 400 times last year, so don’t try to chase it.(MHO: SEO’s will never stop trying to figure out the algo, no matter how many times they change it!)

Use either a subdomain or a subdirectory. Neither has any innate ranking advantage, so do what’s easiest for you. Both can be used for geotargeting independently in Webmaster Tools. PR from a subdomain travels through links to the main domain and a subdomain can actually have a higher PR than the main domain.

Focus on conversions, not rankings. (MHO: This is rapidly becoming the new mantra of SEO, for better or for worse, but it’s pretty hard to get conversions if you don’t get traffic and if you don’t rank, where does the traffic come from?)

Write compelling title tags. (MHO: And write enticing metadescriptions with calls to action that give readers a reason to click on your listing.)

PageRank is a measure of the quantity and quality of the links pointing to a web page, but is only one of about 200 factors that go into the algo. The Supplemental Index is based purely on PageRank. (MHO: You hear a lot of folks poo-pooing PR but, as long as you realize its limitations, it provides valuable clues that I use daily when working on websites. It’s the relativeness of PR that helps with SEO.)

Last, but not least, “index, follow” tags are useless. That’s what spiders do, you don’t need to tell them to do it.

I’ll be attending every one of these events that Google puts on and I hope you will be, too. Subscribe to the WebMaster Central Blog Feed to get notice of these events and to stay up to date on other items of interest. Thanks, Google!