Matt Cutts is a Software Engineer who heads the web spam team at Google. Matt has been using WordPress for years and feels WordPress makes search engine optimization easier and easier with each update. On today’s show he highlights the fundamental principles of success for blogging with WordPress. And addresses questions like:

How do I get started?

What tools do I need?

Why choose WordPress?

Which WordPress plugins do I need?

Do meta tags matter?

How do I know what content readers want?

How do I generate unique content - the way Google wants it?

What about duplicate content?

Have I been banned or penalized? Why haven't I been indexed?

Do 301 (permanent) redirects "lose" any page rank?

Want more? Matt promised to return in the future to tackle more of your questions sometime after his trip to Mt. Kilimanjaro. Meanwhile check out lots of helpful videos on YouTube.

Let me give you some advice first: listen to this podcast with your Google Analytics account open and in front of you. Justin Cutroni, this weeks guest, is an asbolute expert on Google Analytics, and he shows by explaining in a very easy way the most fascinating new functions that Google Analytics has to offer and which reports you as a blogger can use to improve your blogging.

The show discusses loads of features, from Advanced Segments and Custom Variables (and how nicely they're integrated into yours trulies new version 4 of his Google Analytics WordPress plugin) to the new Intelligence and Alerts tab. Not only does he explain the concepts, there are some very practical tips, like:

How to create an advanced segment to find the content on your site that is generating most AdSense revenue.

How to create an alert for sudden traffic spikes from referring sites.

If you're serious about blogging and are using Google Analytics, or want to start using it, the hour listening to this podcast is well spent!

Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of one of the world's most popular blogs - Mashable.com, which happens to be powered by WordPress! Since 2005 Mashable has been a leader in social media and technology news coverage in addition to hosting events like the recent media summit and social media day. In tip-packed show, Pete shares with us:

Why he selected and continues to use WordPress,

The secret formula of success for blogs,

How to work with and develop teams,

How to develop communities,

How to  measure growth and monetize,

How to build a brand

In news:

The MU forums are moving

BuddyPress 1.2.5 is out

Four WordCamps this month

Today Joost is joined by Chris Coyier, one of the authors of Digging into Wordpress and the founder of CSS Tricks. Chris and Joost talk about a lot of different subjects, ranging from their individual history with CSS sites to what Chris dubbed "the big three" updates in WordPress 3.0 (custom post types, menus, multi site) and how Chris designs a site.

Alex King is among the original contributors to the WordPress project (which has almost reached version 3.0) and a prolific plugin developer. As you might expect, over the years he and his team at Crowd Favorite have created numerous freely available products and tools for WordPress. A few of them include:

Tagaroo: Suggests possible tags and flickr images for people, places, events etc.

BackupMoxie: A streamlined and transparent backup solution for WordPress sites of any size.

Analytics360: Bring MailChimp and Google Analytics statistics to your WordPress dashboard.

Carrington: An easy to use yet powerful template system for WordPress.

WordPress Help Center: On call WordPress support for tasks of any size.

Upcoming Events:

WordCamp Boulder

The Business of WordPress Conference

Plugin picks of the week:

CMS Tree Page View

Mouse Eye Tracking Service

Chris Pirillo has been a voice, early adopter and harbinger on the web for over a decade. He joins us on this week show to discuss the evolution that his career has taken as open source tools like WordPress also evolved since WordPress MU v1.0. We explored how to build community, manage communities and what specifically is the secret to making unique sites/communities on the web.

Joost and Frederick talk to Dougal Campbell, one of the original WordPress developers. They discuss various topics: from differences between WordPress and Drupal, and how they handle automatic testing and custom data types (for which WordPress has the upcoming custom post types and the pods plugin), to donations (or lack thereof) for plugins. They go in-depth about microformats and RDFa and how you could use the custom field functionality in WordPress (which Dougal wrote) to make use of those. Last but not least, WordPress 3 comes around the corner a couple of times, discussing all the cool new features in it (like author specific templates and background support) and what should and should not be in core, like multi site and multi domain settings.

Web developer Chris Pearson, who specializes in building detailed, robust WordPress themes, most notably the Thesis Wordpress theme, joins Joost and Frederick to discuss how he created Thesis to become the ultimate publishing platform on the web.

Joost and Frederick discuss the WordPress Advanced Ticket System, plus how WordPress and WordPress MU have merged and multi-site functionality will be included in the upcoming Wordpress 3.0.

Joost welcomes the In-House Director of Search Engine Optimization for the Tribune Company, Brent Payne, who has over 7-years of experience in the search engine optimization field.