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8 Best Resources for SEO
By Mark Daoust (c) 2006

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 (http://www.stuntdubl.com/
2006/03/24/seos-and-lawyers-its-a-joke/)). 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 (http://forums.site-reference.com/topic/
2103/7-Best-Resources-for-SEO/).

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
(http://searchenginewatch.com/)

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
(http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/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
(http://www.mattcutts.com/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 (http://www.enquiro.com/net-profit/
Matt-Cutts-Celebrity-Google-Engineer.asp), "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
(http://www.mikegrehan.com/) - 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
(http://www.clickz.com/experts/author/index.php/68633) where he
is a writer. Mike has written some extremely good articles,
including Goodbye, SEO Push. Hello, Pull SEO
(http://www.clickz.com/experts/search/results/article.php/3575856),
A Grand Plan for SEO (http://www.clickz.com/experts/search/
results/article.php/3578971), and SEO Jargon, Real Beef or Just
Baloney? (http://www.clickz.com/experts/search/results/
article.php/3569996). 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
(http://www.webmasterworld.com)

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 (http://www.seochat.com/), V7N forums
(http://www.v7n.com/forums/), and the Digital Point forums
(http://forums.digitalpoint.com/). Search Engine Roundtable
(http://www.seroundtable.com/) does a good job of keeping tabs
on the pulse of search engine marketing forums.

5. Search Engine Guide
(http://www.searchengineguide.com)

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
(http://www.seomoz.org/beginners.php)

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
(http://www.seochat.com/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
(http://tools.seobook.com/)

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 (http://www.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.
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Mark Daoust is the owner of Site Reference
(http://www.site-reference.com).

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