Methink SEO and beer go well together. And one of the ways to get Matt Cutts to talk is to feed him with jugs of German beer. Is that what happened at Pubcon 2008 when he was interviewed by WebProNews?

You can watch the high-quality Youtube video here.

Cutts said, “I’m not sure I would say ranking is dead but it’s not as important as it used to be. The fact is the smart SEOs are not just necessarily looking at the rankings. They are looking at conversion, they are looking at their server log. It’s great if you’re ranking for a phrase but unless that leads to sales that doesn’t help you very much.”

“The challenge is not to pay so much attention to ranking, pay attention to traffic, pay attention to conversions and keep building good content and don’t worry about ‘can I show people that I rank number one for my trophy phrase.’”