One of the things I covered in my CNet: Searchlight blog, was the tools for how website owners, webmasters/mistresses, and other professionals can get a little closer to the search engine spiders.

Along with providing more detailed information and answering more and more questions publicly, the greatest advancement they (the Search Engines) have made has been in creating tools to actually give site owners (who have validated their sites) more information about their sites than they've ever experienced before.

Whether you use Google Webmaster Central or Yahoo!'s Site Explorer, this article goes into the pros and cons of each tool and how it relates to SEO.

Earlier this summer I had the chance to interview (by phone) Maile Ohye Senior Support Engineer at Google. Maile's role is to support users and webmasters, but also to implement changes in Google's code with feedback from users like you. The podcast of my interview has just gone live this week.

Download it now (6 MB, 25 min)

Maile was forthcoming about Google's "new" (i.e. expanded) Webmaster Guidelines. She explained that, in a lot of cases, webmasters don't necessarily have a good understanding of what SEO is, and don't know when they are doing something that violates their guidelines. Gray/black hat discussions like "cloaking" and "doorway" pages are covered within the new guidelines, which is great for big and small SEO shops, too, that may interpret those terms differently.

Maile and I had a geeky discussion about cloaking, session IDs, Flash, progressive enhancement, noscript, sitemaps, rel=nofollow, and paid links. In the end, Maile reaffirmed Google's desire to put users first.

More highlights on my interview here.

Want to spend 30 minutes discussing SEO with Google software engineer Amanda Camp? Well now you can! Errr, to be more precise, you can spend 30 minutes listening to ME discuss SEO with Amanda. :-)

I just posted my interview with Amanda (33 minute MP3, 8 megs), so be sure to have a listen!

See Amanda live this Friday in San Francisco at the Hot Topic: Search Engine Marketing conference being put on by the American Marketing Association.

I had the distinct pleasure of spending an hour on the phone with Vanessa Fox, Product Manager of Google Webmaster Central, interviewing her just over a week ago. Our discussions ran the gamut of SEO issues -- redirects, duplicate content, AJAX, Flash, PageRank, and of course, the wealth of tools and reports that Google has made available in their Webmaster Central.

The interview has been edited down to 40 minutes and is now available for download:

Download / Listen to the interview » (MP3, 9 megs)

Vanessa will be speaking at two of the upcoming American Marketing Association one-day conferences, titled Hot Topic: Search Engine Marketing. Her colleague Amanda Camp will be speaking at the other one.

I will be conducting interviews of all the illustrious faculty of search marketers over the coming weeks, so be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed to get these podcasts delivered directly to you automatically as they are published.

Subscribe to the RSS podcast feed »

These conferences present a unique opportunity to hear -- in a small intimate environment with dozens of delegates instead of hundreds -- the latest tips, tricks, tools, trends and best practices from Googlers Vanessa Fox or Amanda Camp along with search marketing practitioners and gurus Eric Ward, Neil Patel, Alan Rimm-Kaufman, Chris Smith (SuperPages.com), Paul O'Brien (HP) to name a few. :-) Oh, and I'll be speaking too, as well as chairing the events.

Mark your calendars: April 20 in San Francisco, May 25 in NYC, and June 22 in Chicago.

Register now »

Hope to see you there!