Top 5 Things To Do When Meeting Matt Cutts

One of my main goals of SES London, was to try and meet as many SEO guru’s as possible. The trouble is you read their blogs everyday so when you actually meet them in the flesh, you get a little star struck, forget all the burning SEO questions and end up talking about how their flight was or how their hotel is. During the conference I managed to meet Mr Google himself, Matt Cutts right after his keynote discussion with Chris Sherman. So did I ask him about Localisation, geo-targeting, the new links tool on the webmaster console? Um, no but I did get a picture with the man himself.

So I made a list of the top 5 things to do when meeting Matt Cutts not only for the next time I meet him but also for anyone who plans to meet him in the future:

1. Don’t be shy,and say hello. Matt is a top guy and spent a good 30mins with the so called “Cuttlets” taking pictures and more importantly answering lots and lots of questions despite the attempts from the organisers to drag him away to some room closed off to the show attendees

2. Make a list of questions and bring them with you because your mind will go blank when you meet him. My boss always says “Those who fail to plan, plan to fail”. In this case I have to agree with him

3. Make sure you fully charge the battery in your camera. I had a very close call with the battery in mine

4. Don’t be afraid to offer him your card or website details. Matt is very happy to take your card and have a look at your site for you. He also carries round a small notebook in case you don’t have one

5. Make sure you tell him how helpful his blog is. No this is not brown nosing, it’s just the truth.

Some of the others guys I was lucky enough to meet were Rand Fishkin and Chris Sherman who were also very down to earth and friendly. I also spent a lot of the PubCon and some of the tube journey home talking to Pete Wailes who in his own modest words runs a “pretty successful blog” which I recommend everyone checks out. Pete also mentioned he has been asked to speak at the next SES conference so keep an eye out for him there.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Search Engine News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.