Strange Duck - Tech Talk in Plain English

I’m attending Podcamp Toronto this weekend and the first day has proven to be a blast as well as a gold mine for great ideas and information. I have gotten loads of really hot tips and advice from each session I’ve attended, and so have decided to share some of the best ones here.

If you don’t know what a Podcamp is, it’s a BarCamp style meetup for podcasters and listeners, bloggers and readers, and web types. What’s barcamp you ask? Well, as explained on the Official BarCamp web site, it’s an

“ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment…with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants. The name BarCamp was inspired as a complement to FooCamp…“

And so the Camp phenomenon goes. And grows. There are even CaseCamp’s for marketing case studies.

Podcamps have been hosted in seven cities so far, and this is Toronto’s and Canada’s first. The presenters are generous and have come in from places like Boston, Indianna and Montreal. The atmosphere is friendly and warm. And to make it all just perfect, registration, coffee, donuts and even lunch - are all free.

And so, onward to the Top Tips.

Numbers 1-3 are from the session “Giving Your Podcast A Google Presence” with Julien Smith of In Over Your Head.

1. You need to use text to speak to Google.

That’s the language Google speaks, and so you will need to deploy it to get a good Google ranking. Your page title is most important for SEO. Make sure you choose your page title wisely and compose it so that your most important keywords come first - Google has a tendency to cap the amount of words in a title that they will index.

2. Use the free SEO for Firefox plugin.

Once installed, the SEO for Firefox plugin allows you to check up on other people’s web sites so you can do a little snooping about their rankings. Just surf to a competitor’s page, right click on it, and you can choose “Highlight Keyword”, then type in a keyword to see everywhere it appears. Or choose “Keyword Density” to view and assess why other people are ranking higher than you.

3. Giving things away for free can drive people to your web site

Wonder why giving things away for free can be good for business? Because everyone starts talking about you and your product and linking to your site from their blogs or sites. For example, Aaron Wall created this SEO plugin, and if you go to Alexa.com and type in his site’s URL, www.seobook.com, his web site is the 993rd most popular web site on the Internet. And that’s pretty damn good.

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