There’s a nice interview with Matt Cutts on 4Holteliers.com. Matt Cutts is in charge of Google’s Web Spam team, and in the interview, he talks about using your Web site to reach your target customer. As a little bonus, the site has posted the 20-minute video version of the interview as well. It isn’t really about hotel marketing, per se. Instead, it’s a great look inside Google, and what blog optimization steps you can take to improve your natural search rankings.

Cutts confirms all of the things that regular readers of this blog already know about. Solid content is the primary driver for your Web site. Good, useful content will improve your search engine visibility faster than just about anything.

Blog promotion and site promotion are almost as important. Cutts advises that site owners need to be creative in making their Web sites really stand out in the results pages.

In the interview, Cutts makes a very valuable point about the importance of the description tag. He says:

“With Google, through the description tag, one has a good amount of control over what their website will look like in the SERP’s.”

There has been a long-standing debate about the value of the description tag, which Google uses to determine the uniqueness of the page. Some people don’t want to use them because they see little or no apparent effect on search engine visibility. Additionally, some search engine algorithms deprecate description tags as a way to combat spam. Google has been saying for more than a year that the description tag is important in their algorithm. Therefore, if you can create a genuinely descriptive tag for your site, you should.

Cutts also talks about the value of blog marketing, and ways in which business blogging fits into a comprehensive strategy to find and reach a desired audience segment. Blog marketing is a great way to reach out to potential clients, and encompasses many different approaches. Virtually anything, including video, can be included in a blog. According to Cutts, video is one area that small businesses could use to great effect, and currently don’t.

The interview provides very rich, direct information about the effect of blog marketing and blog optimization on search engine visibility, and it’s certainly worth a look.