As technology advances and search engines become more powerful, it’s almost better to rely on them to find what you are looking for rather than a site’s internal search. I know that if you want to find something on Comcasts site, you are better off using Google.

The other day I was on the phone with a client when they asked me what Comcast’s outgoing mail server was. Unsure, I quickly went to comcast.com to look it up. Much to my annoyance, the site is not user friendly.

The first thing I did was put SMTP in the Comcast search box. It returned one result detailing McAfee VirusScan. I then clicked on the ‘High-Speed Internet’ options on the homepage and found out those were just selling me services. Then I clicked on ‘Demos and Manuals’ under the Customers area and it tells me how to hook up my stuff. How about searching the ‘Demos and Manuals’ area? No luck there either.

I then got smart and searched Google for ‘Comcast SMTP’ and the #1 result held my answer.

It’s been said that meta keywords and description tags are dead. Where as I’d agree with the keywords tag, the descriptions tag I’m no longer convinced is dead. Actually, it’s quite important; especially for blogs.

If you use the site: command in Google, and look at Google’s descriptions (aka snippits) for a blog, you may notice some indexing issues. Usually one of two things happens. Either your blog description is generic and includes things like the date and categories, or your blog’s description is exactly the same. The second one will probably land a lot of your pages in the supplemental index.

If you check out Matt Cutt’s blog, you’ll notice that the descriptions start with the date followed by time, categories and then the first few words of his post.

Check out SEOMoz’s blog and you’ll see that most blog posts are showing up as supplementary results as all the descriptions are exactly the same “BLOG CATEGORIES. Advertising, Promotions & Public Relations Online · Analytics, Tracking & Measurement · Ask.com · Blogging & Social Tagging · Google …”

Matt Cutts, Google employee, has been taking search questions and answering them via video.  I wrote in and asked if Google treats blog sites any different than regular websites and he said no.

The thought behind my question was that with more sites converting from static HTML to Wordpress or MovableType, the sites are becoming more complex.  There are posts, pages, feeds, comments and comment feeds.  I wasn’t sure if Google saw these sites any differently than a static HTML site.

My question was answered in the lightning round and it appears at the end of the video clip.

Thanks Matt!!

[tags]matt-cutts,google,movable-type,seo[/tags]