Matt Cutts, a software engineer at Google since 2000, the author of SafeSearch, the Google’s family filter, is famous for his blog where he reveals some of the Google’s secrets. Matt Cutts: Webmaster Guidelines to Succeed in Google. A Video Transcript.

Q: What are the guidelines and recommendations to increase site’s visibility in Google?

The first thing you should do is to ensure that search engine spiders can easily access and crawl your website. You have to look at your website through the search engine eyes or use a text browser like Lynx. If you can go through your entire site using only a text browser than you are probably ok. But most of the people don’t even bother with crawlability, although they can easily improve it by creating a sitemap with text links to all the pages of a website, or by using Google Sitemaps service.

Another big point is content. You must have high quality interesting content that can be a reason to other people to link to your website. Make sure that your content is crawlable and then proceed further with marketing, promoting and optimizing your site. When planning your marketing campaign think about people who are really relevant to your niche and make sure that they know about you. If you are associated with a doctor because you have a medical kind of site, make sure that the doctor knows about you and if he has a website, it might be appropriate for him to link to you. You also should think of a ‘hook’: something valuable. It can be a really good content, for example newsletters, articles or tutorials. Tutorials are especially useful in this way: you explain how to do something and in the same time mention: ‘if you are going to follow this tutorial you might need this or that and you can buy it from us’. Tutorial lessons can be syndicated and added as content to a merchant website driving more visitors and sales.

Another way to increase your exposure is using websites like Digg, Slash-dot, Reddit, Fark and other online social networks with hundreds of thousands visitors. Think of something interesting that sets you apart from the crowd and start posting your news and stories: pretty soon you’ll see a substantial traffic from these community based websites.

So, to sum up: make sure your site is crawlable, think of a hook that makes your visitors return to your site, link to you and bookmark you…

Watch this video here.