Schultz on Pubcon: Blog Optimization + Q/A With Matt Cutts and Jeremy Zawodny
by Adam Schultz

After a great lunch conversation with a highly notable SEO and some rounds around the exhibition hall I hit the "Blogging, Podcasting and RSS feeds" session.

On the panel was Amanda Watlington (searchingforprofit.com), Daron Babin (Webmaster Radio) and Greg Hartnet (botw.org)

Amanda Watlington:
Amanda was first, she started off with a brief synopsis about recognizing that not all content is suitable for feeding and that you need to insure that by creating a feed of some of your content, you are adding value rather than just serving up empty carbs.

She then went into a lot of detail on intricate details of blog optimization. Honestly some of it was lost on me as there was a lot she was covering in a short amount of time.

The focus was on the basics like the tools to use, plug-ins available, basic SEO optimization, the importance of great content and how to syndicate and socialize your blog. All and all, from someone with a lot to learn about the subject, it was quite informative.

Daron Babin:
Daron was next. He was here to discuss (of course) podcasting.

As someone who knows less about podcasting than I do about blog technology I found this presentation very useful. Here are some of the key points.

Get a real deck sooner than later if your going to be serious about your podcasting instead of a starter kit.

Keep bandwidth in mind as the first time you have a successful episode, you're likely to get a call from your web host about the sudden increase in demand.

There are many sites available for you distribute your content that are more able to handle the load.

As with all online content, organize it well and use compelling titles. There are lots of ways to tag and optimize your podcast including the use of id3 tags.

Greg Hartnet:
Then Greg Hartnet spoke. Greg did a great job of breaking down the overall strategy of a successful blog including a separate hand out of some of the resources available for socialization so he wouldn't get mired in these details during the presentation.

I'm sure if you visit botw.org and shoot him an email he will send you the soft copy of the resource list. Let him know that Adam Schultz sent you and you might be able to get him to send you a cool best of the web t-shirt too.

Here are the primary points of a successful blog strategy:

• The more you put in, the more you will get out.
• Freshen up your writing skills to insure credibility.
• Optimize urls, use blog categorization and properly set up your pings to insure auto updating.
• Submit your blog to blog search sources.
• Get social through news sites like digg, blog commenting, forum participation and building your blogroll.
• He also discussed the use of photo and video sharing sites to take the conversation beyond your blog into new forums like flickr groups.

Q/A with Jeremy Zawodny and Matt Cutts:
A nice surprise in the QA portion came when Jeremy Zawodny and Matt Cutts joined the panel to talk about how the engines treat blogs.

No real new info here, just that blogs are indexable content to the engines and are treated accordingly.

If the blog is news-related then that is where you will see the results, otherwise, blogs will show up where the pages are relevant to a search. They also admitted that indexing video and audio files is still a challenge and has a long way to go.

I guess some people still need to hear it from these guys to believe it.

Be that as it may, it was cool to see them in the same room. They really do seem to have this superhero aura to them. I was tempted to go take pictures with them like Donald Duck at Disney world. I didn't... no camera... probably better off.

I closed the evening hanging out with Mike Grehan and gang discussing the finer points of airline safety and smoked trout.

This session write up by Adam Schultz, MarketSmart Interactive's Manager of Product Development.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |