Essential SEO Blogs | Stay Up-to-date On The Search Engine Optimization World.

By: Solomon Rothman

There are a lot of SEO/SEM blogs out there, and lots of them dole out bad advice or repeat each other. Here is a list of my top 10 blogs that provide the largest array of different...

...ormation on the search industry. If youre monitoring Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Marketing I would recommend you check them out, as I read them regularly.

NOTE: Ive included black hat and grey hat SEO blogs here, not because I necessarily condone their practices (I dont like spam or spammers), but because a lot of what grey hat and black SEO involves shapes the search engine world as much as white hat SEO, and if you really want to understand SEO, you have to learn about what it is, what can hurt you, and where its going. Information is power and these blogs contain the most real information on different aspects of the SEO world.

Seobook.com by AaronWall

Aaron Wall writes a lot, and I mean a lot. Its one of the most active blogs written by a single individual Ive ever seen. He also authors a book on SEO and writes for other websites as well. Seobook is an essential blog because it contains well-researched articles that express opinions and arent just parrots of existing news. He also provides real life examples from his very successful SEO campaigns and is considered to be an industry leader.

SeoMoz.com

They post a lot and are connected to the hub of the search engine optimization world. The posts provide a large amount of links to different things happening in the SEO world. The blog at SeoMOZ links out a lot, so you can get references to an entire list of stuff to research and peruse, all presorted for you by SEO experts with the occasional bout of humor thrown in.

Greywolfs SEO Blog

This is an outstanding blog because, unlike almost all SEO blogs, this one contains lots of little experiments Greywolf is messing with. So the information it contains is unique and filled with a distinctly first person voice and some humor. This blog addresses a lot of the more aggressive SEO techniques through experimentation and offers the pros and cons of each well.

SEO Blackhat

Dont let the name scare you; this blog (which ranks on Google and isnt penalized) discusses in unedited detail the philosophy of SEO and its techniques. It also gives excellent counter arguments and discussion about the present and future of the search engine industry. The authors creative and super opinionated voice make this site quite interesting to read.

Search Engine Watch Blog

This is a professional blog following the search engine industry. Articles are well written and professionally edited. Great place to stay up-to-date on news and have insider comments. Many of the posts here end up being parroted around on thousands of other SEO blogs.

Search Engine Land by Danny Sullivan

Although it doesnt officially launch until December 11th, Im including it here because Danny Sullivan is one of (if not the most) respected name in SEO and has probably written more about SEO than anyone else. Ill be following his new blog and so will everyone else; it is written in an in the news / whats happening with the search engines style.

SEO Chat

This blog / site with an rss feed is home to lots and lots of articles. Some are a little on the boring side, but I still think its a great information source. Its an essential reading place if youre a beginner or new to SEO. It is written in a long, wordy newspaper-style and explores SEO topics in detail.

Matt Cutts

Google engineer and search celebrity Matt Cutts writes this blog. Although anything major said here will be repeated over and over and analyzed to the max, this blog is a must read for the official Google position on SEO, but also for the wonderful comments his posts receive; they are full of intriguing, heated discussions and debate. The comments alone make this a must read.

This brings us to the most important SEO blog of all time:

Stir Crazy, Acclivitys SEO & Internet Marketing Blog! Ha ha. Dont I wish!

Please comment and add links to the SEO blogs you follow. NO RAW URLS OR SIMPLISTIC TITLES. Please tell everyone why you like it and feel its a valuable resource for people wanting to stay up-to-date on the search engine optimization world.

As an aside, you might possibly be wondering why Im providing links to other SEO consultant blogs when they also provide commercial SEO services? Well, that answer takes several parts:

  To encourage other sites to link to this list and potentially increase the value / rankings of this site.
  Im looking to take on a select number of good clients, so that we can provide high quality seo campaigns and personal attention. Even at max capacity most of the people reading this will have to pay different seo consultants and firms for their services.
  Knowledge is power. It will help me if you have researched SEO and know a bit about it. SEO is more than theory and research; its a bunch of hard work and unless you have an onstaff guy or are willing to invest large portions of your life learning and doing SEO then you need to hire someone to do this for you.
  I like SEO and people like to link to and promote things about the topics they enjoy.
  I want cookies

searchnewz.com

SEO Friendly Dynamic Websites

One of the most important aspects of search engine optimization is relevant content and the management of that content on your website. Your website should include up to date information about your services, industry or products. Continual updates should be a part of your weekly or monthly website maintenance process. Areas that can provide strong content to your site are industry related news, online newsletters and text that shows you as an authority in your field.

A content management system allows the website owner to post the latest news and information about their company on the website. The site owner can log into an administrative area of the website and post news updates and archive older postings for retrieval and reading by the website visitor from any computer in the world that has Internet access.

Be careful when selecting a CMS. Choose one that is easy to use, employs a unique URL naming convention, and is search engine friendly and easy on the budget. Choose one that allows you to set your page titles, Meta descriptions and Meta keywords. A good CMS should employ a unique naming convention in the URL that actually means something to the search engine spider. You can download a free CMS from other sources, but if you are looking for an advantage to the thousands of other pages on the web that look like this... http://www.somedomain.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=category§ionid=4&id=16&Itemid=27 Then make sure you do your homework.

A fast growing segment on the web is the RSS feed and the ability to use RSS feeds (with the authors permission) to supplement the content on your website. Typical web based RSS aggregators simply allow you to publish a headline and a link from your chosen feed. This provides you with very little fresh content on your site and gives visitors no potential reasons to return. This also offers very little value to search engine optimization efforts. Some rss aggregators take information from the feeds you choose and generates SEO friendly html pages for each item in the feed. This quickly turns a 10 page website into a much larger, more robust site complete with relevant content that continually grows.

When selecting tools to develop your seo friendly dynamic website, pay attention to the options offered and how they may impact your site. Several tools are available, but only a hand full are worth their salt.

Jeff Phillips is the Founder and President of CAD Enterprises LLC. CAD Website Design is a full service web design company dedicated to creating user friendly websites that reinforce branding, increase site traffic and strengthen customer loyalty. CAD Website Design provides sophisticated database design and programming that enables dynamic content generation and database integration using PHP Programming and MySQL. By providing simple to use back end management areas, CAD Website Design empowers you to manage your content and edit information with the simple click of a button. Adwords Users Can Now Target Adsense Channels Simple copywriting Crazzy Egg - Track, evaluate and improve your site

Quick Tips For Instant Results

People ask me on a daily basis how to do a couple of quick fixes which will make their site appear higher in the search results. The type of people that ask me are usually people who have been doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) themselves but have not had any great success. This article is for people just starting to do SEO or for people who have been doing it for a long time. The tips are easy to implement and anyone who knows a bit about HTML and SEO will be able make the changes easily.

This article will out line a number of "Quick Fixes" which will make your site move up the search results almost immediately.

1) Use H1, H2, H3 tags in your content with your keywords appearing in them.
2) Use Alt Tags in your website; make sure that they include your keywords too.
3) Create fresh content as frequently as possible.
4) Don't let your keyword density exceed 15%.
5) Make sure you don't have a slow loading site.
6) No duplicate content, always keep your text original.
7) Make sure your navigation is text based and your site is easy to navigate
8) Have many RELEVANT backlinks to your website.
9) Backlinks should include anchor text that is varied.
10) Don't link to banned sites or "bad neighbourhoods"
11) Don't use too much script, make sure your site is content rich.
12) Don't ever use Frames or Flash.

These tips are suggested for websites that are established already and have some history. New sites should be optimised as they are build and as they are new it will take a while for the search engines to show them in their results. Therefore, any changes made will not have any effect on a new site with no history or backlinks.

It requires great patience to do SEO effectively; the most important factor in SEO is building a good number of backlinks to your site. The backlinks should be from many different sources and be related to your industry in some why. Also, use your keywords in your anchor text – this will make a huge difference.