• DON’T cold call me just because I’ve just connected with someone you know on LinkedIn.
• DON’T pretend that I should know who you are. – If you’ve never spoken to me before, an introduction is appropriate.
• DON’T just use random keywords from my blog and profile and assume they define me. Just because I’ve written about an SEO talk I went to two years ago doesn’t mean that I do SEO a living. (Hint: My resume & profile talk about software development. SEO is not software development).
• DON’T just pass on my name and number to a co-worker without any context.
• DO email me with an introduction and specific details and, if you must call, ask for a good time to do so.
• DO know who I am and what I do before you call.
• DO understand that my time is valuable and that, as a contractor,  I’m losing money if I’m talking to you.

(And in case you are thinking about contacting me, I’m not looking for new opportunities at the moment.)

To that end, on Wednesday I attended a talk/networking event at Yahoo’s Santa Monica office given by Vanessa Fox of  janeandrobot.com. The discussion was informal, yet informative even for one who has just begun to be interested in SEO. I learned several things, many of which are available elsewhere on the web, but I will repeat them here in no particular order:

• The guiding principle of SEO is similar to that of journalism: For each page, imagine that the user has just landed there and not seen any other pages of the site.
• The consensus amongst the group was that the only search engine that matters is Google. Yahoo is nearly irrelevant. Bing/Microsoft does not yet have their act together.
• The most important features of a page are url, <title>, <h1>, and meta description. URLs should be vaguely descriptive (i.e. not something like store?prodid=12)
• Text should be unique (especially the text in the above features).
• Ads are bad.

And, a few resources that I have found in the past few days:

1. Google’s best practice document [pdf]
2. janeandrobot.com/resources (note how the URL exactly describes what it is!)
3. Yahoo’s site explorer
4. Google site search – ie google “site:yourdomain.com”. Are you happy with the way things look in the result? If not, edit the meta description.
5. Of course, Google’s free webmaster and analytics tools. (signup required)

And, work continues on the walki-talk.com audio tour guides.

[xkcd.com]

Last night I learned that walki-talki.com’s walking tour of London was just approved by Apple for release and posted to the App Store. I won’t re-post all of the details (you can check them out here). But I will say that it’s about time!! Apple has taken nearly 2 weeks to approve this app, but has not yet approved our Amsterdam tour, despite it being submitted a month earlier! Anyway, enough griping. We are very pleased to be making progress.