Three of the most trusted SEO and social media experts, Rhea Drysdale, Tamar Weinberg and Lee Odden. Photo by toprankonlinemarketing.
Interviews are often overlooked pieces of distilled wisdom. They aren’t very popular on social media but they definitely should be! In interviews experts often provide the most valuable nuggets of their knowledge in a very concise form. You need to study dozens of other blog posts to learn as much.
Moreover experts often tend to focus on one aspect a time when they write something themselves, even when compiling a list like this. On the other hand interviews focus on several key questions an expert wouldn’t even attempt to cover in one blog post or seminar. These facts combined result in in a very condensed piece of advice.
Also it’s quite difficult to determine who’s a real expert and who is not in the SEO industry and even more in social media marketing.
When someone gets interviewed s/he’s either popular or an expert or both. The difficulty in compiling this list of interviews was not finding 30 of them but sorting out the less valuable ones from the dozens there are. Also I wanted to feature not only the people everybody knows already like Rand Fishkin or Matt Cutts. There are numerous interviews with them.
Some true experts hide behind an invisible persona as an inhouse SEO and/or social media expert
but really have something to say others haven’t. So I added a few of inhouse SEO expert from big enterprises.
Last but not least I couldn’t find good interview that offers deep insights with some of the brightest minds of the industry like Danny Sullivan or Barry Schwartz. There were either too short, shallow, outdated or too much focused on a specific event or topic. Add those in the comment section if you think they are must read. I repeat, I didn’t just look at the names, I solely selected those interviews that offer real insights.
OK, enough of this, follow the links below to read the interviews with some of the most renowned SEO and social media experts.
SEO experts
- Interview of Tedster from WebmasterWorld: Ted Ulle’s Mad SEO Chops
- Cracking the Google Algorithm, and Understanding Search Patents with Ted “tedster” Ulle
- How SEOmoz’s Founder Went From Deep Debt To $4+ Mil Per Year – with Rand Fishkin
- Interview with Lee Odden of Top Rank
- Five Link Building Experts: A Group Interview – Sugarrae
- The SBS Interview: Lee Odden
- Ruud Questions: Aaron Wall
- Ruud Questions: Michael Gray a.k.a. Graywolf
- Rhea Drysdale Interview
- Ruud Questions: Tadeusz Szewczyk aka Tad Chef aka onreact
- Interview with Ralph Tegtmeier aka fantomaster
Inhouse SEO experts
- In-House SEO for News Site CNN : Talking In-House SEO with CNN’s Topher Kohan
- Getting SEO Answers From The Source: An Interview With SEO Insider Tony Adam
- Big Brand SEO Expert: Dan Perry Turner Broadcasting Interview
- SEO Auteur: My Interview With Dustin Woodard
- Brent D. Payne Interview of Chicago Tribune Company SEO
Social Media experts
- Social Media Interview: HP’s Tac Anderson
- Interview with Social Media Expert Alex Howard
- Ruud Questions: Steve Rubel
- Ruud Questions: Hugo Guzman
- Tamar Weinberg Interview – Author of “The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web”
- Personal Branding Interview: Tamar Weinberg
- Expert Interview Series: Jim Sterne on measuring your social media marketing campaigns
- Dan Zarrella – Interview
- Social Media Interview with Stuart Foster
- Social Media Q&A with the NHL’s Michael DiLorenzo
Matt Cutts and other Google employees
- Eric Enge interviews Matt Cutts
- Google Experts Answer your SEO Questions
- Google Search Guru Singhal: We Will Try Outlandish Ideas
- 20 (Rare) Questions for Google Search Guru Udi Manber
- Matt Cutts: How Google Deals With Web Spam
Business Blogging experts
- How to Build a 50,000 Subscriber Blog in Two Years
- Problogger – Interview and Q&A with Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett
- Interview with Glen Allsopp from ViperChill
- Interview with Business Blogger Steven Snell on His Recent 50k Blog Sale
To be honest: A list of interviews with experts in both SEO and social media could have been a top 100, 200 or 2000. Due to time and reader attention limitations I had to choose approx. 30 of them. Don’t think just because I haven’t included someone s/he isn’t an expert. It was a really tough choice.
I even included an interview with myself without being sure whether people consider me an expert but I was quite sure that I provided some unique insights in this interview.
So accept my apologies for not being on the list please!
Btw. how do I know who’s an expert and who is not? Difficult question. I think I’m at least expert enough by now to determine who is an expert on the subject of SEO and social media.
The interviews above have been conducted between 2008 and 2010. For hundreds of SEO & social media interviews from 2008 and earlier visit this huge list by Donna Fontenot.
Thanks for the mention Tad. Impressive that you found a photo of Lisa, Tamar, Rhea and me without a goatee!
Oops, forgot the real reason for my comment – wish I could edit my last one. DazzlinDonna literally has hundreds of SEO interviews logged here but hasn’t updated in a while.
Hey Lee, that just shows how long you’re in business by now. You can follow the time periods by your hair styling! ;-)
Yes, indeed. How could I have forgotten about Donna’s huge collection. Mea culpa! I’ll add it at the bottom of the post.
Btw. I can merge both of your comments if you like.
Thanks for the mention Tad and LOL about Lee’s goatee! I’m a huge fan of Rae’s link building series and any interview from Eric Enge as he gets so in-depth. Love that you included Fantomaster’s interview with Aaron Wall, definitely one of the best interviews I’ve ever read. Great list and bookmarking it for some future reading.
Hey Tad, Thanks so much for the mention. I really enjoyed interviewing Jacob Gube of Six Revisions. He’s such a humble and smart blogger, and has definitely made the best of social media.
A very good info source and this could be a very difficult task to tackle interviews and manage them,Thanks for a photo.We could see u all together atlast….Nice Too see you all there.
We are in too green house data ,for more details you can follow us on TWTR->http://twitter.com/esdsdatacenter
I thin anyone who has been around long enough it’s not really the front-person who knows best, I always like to see who they rely on to get a better source of information, Hence dig deep,
Thanks for shining a little light on the people in the background Tad, I’ll have to wait until this weekend before I can really get into the meat of the interviews
Great post, it’s funny to see how only two years ago there were no social media experts anywhere to be found. now since the social revolution dozens of them pop up like mushrooms after the rain.
This is what i love about my job, every year we see completely differnt methods coming up and needed to be taken into account.
Thanks for the info source.
BTW, to anyone who is familiar with the HITS algorithm
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm)
This page makes a really good HUB page.
Thanks again.
Really when anybody gives his/her interview then it is necessary that he/she should explain all things in detail as the same when I read this interview , really I find this is good interview.
You need to have many skills in social mediato be
socially successful in real life. You need to establish a respect and
presence before you will earn respect, authority, and the ability to
succeed