Frankly Speaking on SEO

A big thank you to Andrew Coates and Michael Kordahi for having me on their Frankly Speaking podcast to chat about SEO. You can listen to it here.

Frankly Speaking (for those who aren’t yet familiar with it) is an Australian Tech podcast (or perhaps even an Australian Microsoft podcast) and listening to it should be on your weekly To-Do list.

SEO is a big topic of course so we only scratched the surface, but here’s a summary and links to the various items we touched on:

• Danny Sullivan on SEO for Bill Gates – in which Danny reviewed Bill Gates’ new site The Gates Notes and provided a bunch of suggestions for how he could improve his search engine rankings. (By the way, in the podcast I referred to Danny as the grandfather of SEO, I meant to say the grandmaster of SEO :-))
• Bill Gates on Twitter: @BillGates
• Search innovation – Google releases 100-120 experiments each quarter
• Ranking factors – I recommend this Ranking Factors article from SEOmoz for a full run down of important items to consider, and for simple basics that you can action today take a look at my SEO for bloggers overview.
• Plus make sure you read Google’s SEO Starter Guide (PDF download here)
• Ego surfing: Michael Kordahi on Bing, Michael Kordahi on Google and of course: google street view nude
• ASP.NET 4.0 improvements for SEO – see Scott Guthrie’s post here
• Self hosted WordPress 
• Topsy – WordPress plug-in for showing Twitter mentions as blog post comments
• IIS SEO Toolkit – Recommended for analysing issues on your site and highlighting problems. You may be interested in the full IIS SEO Toolkit review I did over on the XEN SEO site.
• To check how many people are searching particular keywords try the Google Keyword tool or the Microsoft Advertising Intelligence Excel plug-in (review here)
• Google analytics – other analytics tools I use include: Clicky, Chartbeat, ClickTale and Mint (note: Mint is self hosted and requires PHP & MySQL)
• Mark Vozzo (on Twitter) <- SEO guru
• Building a niche – Copyblogger article
• Link building – excellent overview by Aaron Wall (from SEO Book) <- highly recommended
• There’s tons of good SEO resources out there (and plenty of noise as well). Here’s a list of the main SEO resources I recommend for getting up to speed.

Have a listen here.

BTW I wanted to apologise for the volume of my voice being low at times. This is due to one of the following reasons (I’ll let you decide which):

1. I’m really shy and talk softly
2. I have bad microphone technique and even though Michael spent a while giving me tips at the start and then repeatedly gesturing for me to speak closer to the microphone throughout the interview I kept moving away from it.

In any case, they did a great job boosting up my volume in the final cut. Thanks guys.

Oh, and on a completely unrelated note, congrats to Christian Longstaff on baby number #2 arriving this week.