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I am
always amazed at the response I receive from
people when they find out what I do. When I
explain that I own Site-Reference which publishes
articles on marketing, website development, and
search engine optimization, invariably they get a
little gleam in their eye at search engine
optimization and ask - "So you could get my
website to the top of Google, right?"
Yeah, something like that.
Now I would never call myself an SEO – I
simply do not have the patience for it. Besides,
being a professional SEO is starting to take on a
distinction that was once held primarily by
lawyers (see StuntDubl's SEO's and
Lawyers post). The problem with SEO's is that there
are far too many people who liberally take on the
title, and few too many people who are actually
real SEO's. The further problem is that a bad SEO
can do far more damage than if you were to do
nothing at all.
I think this, and the pure cost of SEO, are the
reasons that most website owners choose to take
SEO in-house. Unfortunately, SEO is a field which
is complicated, and there is a lot of information
available – much of which is not necessarily
true. Cutting through the clutter is a daunting
task, and the result is that many website owners
will take bad advice and end up spinning their
SEO wheels to no effect, or worse yet, end up
hurting their business.
It is in the spirit of trying to offer website
owners with a good starting point for learning
the basics of SEO that we offer eight of the best
resources. This is by no means a comprehensive
list of all the best resources, and there are
probably some very good resources that did not
make this list that deserve to be here. If you
think that we missed a killer resource, feel free to let us know
about it.
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Also, this list does not try to rank any of these
resources. It is hard enough choosing just eight
quality resources, we are certainly not ambitious
enough to try and rank them.
1. Search Engine Watch
This should be of no surprise to anyone who
spends any time in the SEO community. Search
Engine Watch, and maybe more importantly, the
Search Engine Watch blog is invariably on every
professional SEO's daily reading list. Danny
Sullivan, the founder of Search Engine Watch, is
often referred to as the person who formed the
industry. Much of the SEO information that gets
repeated from one SEO blog to another starts at
SEW.
2. Matt Cutts
Blog
Whenever I hear the name Matt Cutts, I laugh. It
has nothing to do with Matt himself (I've never
actually met him, but have heard nothing but good
things about him). It is more what the SEO
community has done to him. To borrow a line from
Gord Hotchkiss, "when Matt's in a room,
Paris Hilton could walk through in a thong and
not get a second glance." Then again, isn't
that what Paris Hilton normally wears?
Matt's relative fame is rooted in the fact that
he is one of the first 100 employees at Google,
an engineer in the search spam department, and
has become a conduit of information between
Google and the SEO community. Matt Cutts' blog
often contains information about major updates
(most of the Big Daddy update information came
directly from Matt Cutts), examples of what not
to do with your website, advice on how to rank
well with Google, and also the normal day-to-day
life of being a Googler.
Between Matt's blog, the numerous interviews he
does with bloggers, his freely giving of his time
at search conferences, and the fact that he works
for Google, Matt is easily the most identifiable,
and authoritative, figure in the SEO industry.
3. Mike Grehan's Blog
The site does not display correctly in Firefox
– you need to use IE6. Mike, if you end up
reading this, PLEASE get the new template done!
As you find more and more places with information
on SEO, you will find that a lot of the
information is duplicated or repackaged in some
way, but it is usually the same information. Mike
Grehan's blog tends to take a fresh look at SEO
from a different angle.
To find out more about Mike, you can view his
profile at Clickz where he is a writer. Mike has
written some extremely good articles, including
Goodbye, SEO Push. Hello, Pull SEO, A Grand Plan
for SEO, and SEO Jargon, Real Beef or Just
Baloney?. His blog is not limited to just SEO,
but like many blogs also acts as a bit of an
online diary (he does A LOT of traveling to
conferences), but when he does post on SEO we
have always found his approach to SEO to be very
professional, precise, and backed with the
confidence of real experience. Since he serves as
an SEO consultant to some very large
corporations, we should expect nothing less.
4. Webmaster World and Some Other Forums
Forums are tricky – they are a great place
to check the pulse on the SEO industry, a great
place to learn, and a great place to network with
some very good SEOs. But they are also breeding
grounds for bad information. Bad information
spreads faster than quality information in SEO
and trying to distinguish on your own what is
good and what is bad could lead to disaster. But
forums offer what a blog cannot – an
interactive community.
Knowing that all information in forums is not the
gospel truth, there are a few forums that stand
head and shoulders above the rest. Probably the
best known would be the Webmaster World forums.
Webmaster World is a very well known community
with some very prominent participants.
Other forums which rise to the top time and time
again would be SEOChat, V7N forums, and the
Digital Point forums. Search Engine Roundtable
does a good job of keeping tabs on the pulse of
search engine marketing forums.
5. Search Engine Guide
If you want to get a good mix of links from a
variety of resources offering some of the latest
information on SEO news without being totally
overwhelmed (or simply don't have the time for a
forum), then Search Engine Guide would be a good
place to start. Search Engine Guide daily offers
a nice mix of links and news from various forums,
blogs, and SEO news websites. The site has grown
steadily, and Robert Clough has done a good job
of helping the site grow over the years.
6. A Beginner's Guide to SEO -
SEOMoz
The title of this is fairly self-explanatory. If
you are feeling overwhelmed by all the search
blogs which often-times look at more advanced
concepts and are just looking for a good basic
guide to SEO, SEOMoz has put together a fantastic
guide.
The guide is fairly comprehensive, nicely
organized, and available in a variety of formats
(very useful if you do not like reading online).
Best of all, it is 100% free. There are a lot of
books available for purchase, but the basics of
SEO are all fairly well-covered in this online
guide.
7. SEO Chat - SEO Tools
It is my opinion that all SEO Tools need to be
taken with some caution. SEO tools, like forums,
can be misleading. Most SEO tools will evaluate
an aspect of your website according to what the
tool's creator believes to be important aspects
of SEO. The problem with this is that no one,
other than the engineers who put the search
engines together, knows how the search engines
work. SEO tools can be useful, but should be used
knowing that no single tool will get you a top
ranking.
That being said, SEO Chat has a nice section of
tools which are freely available. These are
pretty much the standard set of SEO tools that
you can probably find at a variety of websites.
Some of the more interesting and useful tools are
the multiple datacenter checks, the URL Rewriting
tools, and the Spider Simulator.
8. SEO Book's Tools
While we are on the subject of SEO Tools, if you
are looking for a set of rather non-traditional
SEO tools, Aaron Wall over at SEOBook.com has put
together a very nice set of tools. These tools
are not just your regular "check where you
are in the rankings" tools – these dig
a bit deeper.
One of the very nice features of SEOBook's tools
is that most of them are open source code, which
means you could put the code on your website and
run the programs from there. Aaron is also the
owner of Threadwatch.org which can offer some
good information on SEO related issues.
SEO for the Practical Website Owner
Practically speaking, the average website owner
is not going to spend a day pouring over the
latest patent filings by Google. It simply is not
reasonable for a website owner to concern
themselves to this level of detail with the
details of SEO.
The truth of the matter, however, is that most
website owners can see moderate SEO success by
simply keeping a pulse on the SEO industry,
picking up the information that is freely flowing
through the many, many resources for SEO, and
applying them to their website. The science of
SEO, trying to figure out to the finest detail of
how search engines work, is complicated, but
search engines have a very simple goal: to
present searches with relevant, up to date,
quality results.
While a website owner may not want to spend hours
every day reading patents or testing various SEO
theories on test accounts, knowing the basics of
SEO, and keeping up with the trends of the
industry by paying attention to some of its
finest resources, can be all that a website owner
needs.
About The Author
Mark Daoust is the owner of Site Reference.
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