10 Must-Read Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Blogs
Search engine optimization or SEO is one of the important aspects of blogging that we should inevitably deal with. No matter how brilliant the content of your site if it is not optimized for search engines, you will definitely have a hard time attracting traffic to your site and ranking better in search engine results. You cannot just sit there and hope that people will find your blog. You have to optimize the contents of your site because search engines such as Google and Yahoo! are after all, still the largest source of traffic by far. In my case, I usually get more than half of my traffic from search engines. (I am not an SEO expert so I couldn’t say if it’s a good batting average…?)
To optimize your site, you can either hire an SEO expert but most of them come with a price. On the other hand, if you decide to do search engine optimization yourself, be prepared to face a phenomenally steep learning curve.SEO is not just about adding meta tags to html code. Also search engines like Google is constantly changing the rules for SEO. Some tactics once permitted are now labeled as spam, and could forever block normally achievable high rankings within the search engines.
Thus, it is best to keep ourselves informed on these things by learning SEO from the search engine masters. Below are what I consider must-read blogs if you want to improve your SEO skills. They may not be the best out there but these are the ones that helped me a lot in at least understanding how SEO works. I am sure each of us has his or her own favorite SEO blog. Let us know of your must-read SEO blog by posting the link in the comments box below:
In no particular order, here are our top 10 must read SEO blogs:
SEO Blog 01: SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog
SEOmoz Blog provides the web’s best community, tools and educational resources for people and companies engaged in Internet marketing and search engine optimization. The information you can find here are geared so that the inexperienced user can learn the basics of search engine optimization.
SEO Blog 02: Search Engine land
A news and information site covering search engine marketing, searching issues and the search engine industry by by more than 50 SEO experts. If you want to keep up with search marketing news on a daily basis, then you must check out this site.
SEO Blog 03: Google Webmaster Central Blog
Checkout Google Webmaster Central Blog for official advice, tips and news directly from the people at Google who build tools to support site owners looking to increase their traffic. This site serves as a one-stop shop for webmaster resources that will help you with your crawling and indexing questions, introduce you to offerings that can enhance and increase traffic to your site, and connect you with your visitors.
SEO Blog 04: Matt Cutts
Keep abreast with the internal thinkings of Google about what’s acceptable and unacceptable SEO. Google’s search spam fighting czar Matt Cutts actually maintains an interesting blog about gadgets, google, and SEO.
SEO Blog 05 – Search Engine Journal
Search Engine Journal specializes in a community approach to the reporting of search engine news & the sharing of Search Engine Marketing knowledge and tactics.What I find useful from this blog are its regular “top lists” and top SEO add-ons for Firefox, top Google AdWords reports, etc.
SEO Blog 06 – SEO Black Hat
Black Hat search engine optimization is customarily defined as the practice of using unethical techniques to make your search rankings go up. The SEO Black Hat Blog offers articles on Blackhat SEO, Linkbait & Link Spamming. Learn the tactics and use it to your advantage.
SEO Blog 07 – SEO Book
SEO Book offers marketing tips, search analysis, online business tips, and general commentary on the evolution of the web. The blog is able to capture key points and observations on both SEO tactics and issues in short and interesting posts.
SEO Blog 08 – SEO Chat
SEO Chat is a good place to go for SEO advice. The forums provide its member a venue to discuss and look for tested solutions to SEO issues. It also offers offers a huge list of tools that you can use to improve your SEO endeavors. One of the best tools I have found on the website is the Keyword Difficulty Checker.
SEO Blog 09 – Search Engine Roundtable
This site will keep you stay informed about conversations on the hottest SEO discussion boards (e.g. Cre8asite, WebmasterWorld, DigitalPoint, etc.) without having to read them, this blog is your first stop.
SEO Blog 10 – NinebyBlue Blog
This site provides fantastic advice about technical issues related to SEO as well looking at search analytics. The best thing about this site is that, it’s being maintained by the person behind Google Webmaster Central, Vanessa Fox.
SEO plays major role in developing websites, if sites is well optimized it generates more traffic and improves ROI. even Graphic design helps to improve website quality
@Graphic Designing -
I agree! Sites that are optimized, have great layout and useful content usually get the biggest share of Internet traffic.
Thanks for the list. I know some of them (like SEO Book and SEOmoz) because I have been dabbling on SEO for some time now but there are some that you’ve listed that are new to me, so thank you for that.
I have a question for you, why did you leave the permalink setting of this blog at the default setting? I am just wondering. But despite leaving your permalink settings at default, your traffic is still very very good. Do you have a SEO secret? Share naman dyan
@Pastilan -
. Is there a 100% guarantee that migration to a new structure would be a smooth? Anyways, the blog’s doing well…
Very good question. I am not good at codes and I just learned some of the SEO stuffs through online research. I have been contemplating to change my permalink structure but I don’t want to mess up with it because I might end up getting 404 errors and lose all the links that I have built up through time. I am looking at some plugins to do the job for me but I am still afraid to do so. HELP!!! I think this blog would rank better if I change my permalink structure.
@admin – Your fear about changing your permalink structure is well-founded. Although I know of some plugins that claim to make the transition smoothly for blogs like yours, I haven’t actually tried those because all my WP blogs have /%postname%/ structure from the start.
Here are some links that may help you :
http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/permalinks-migration-plugin/
http://www.tubetorial.com/change-wordpress-blog-links-without-breaking-them/
Your best bet is to try it first with your other blogs that are not as old as this one
Thanks for providing such a nice seo resource. You provide very helpful information and links.
Thanks for all the help. I hope I could muster the courage to shift to prettier and seo-friendlier permalinks.
Thanks for providing such an excellent blogs.
Thanks for sharing the List…amazing list indeed
How blogs can be used in the best way for doing seo for our website?
@click here -
Bloggers should get updated with SEO techniques as these are not constant. These blogs/websites provide useful insights about this topic.I’m surprised why you’re asking this particular question. You seem to be more knowledgeable about this topic since you are running a site about web optimization.
Good read, thanks.
I believe on what you say about SEO. There is no way you can earn from blogging if you don’t have enough traffic.
say no to the nofollow meta
Thx…
@Joe -
I’m still thinking about removing the no follow tag because I want to get genuine comments and exchange of ideas here. I hate to think that some guys out there post comments for the sole purpose of getting backlinks.
@hanelbel -
Thanks. Focus on building traffic first by posting quality content. Frequency of posting (quantity) counts, too! because that gives you more landing pages for your site.
im just a beginner in Search Engine Optimization and i am still doing quite a lot of research about basic SEO.
SEO is a very interesting as well as very challenging job which calls for special expertise. People who take care of the SEO part of a website are also called SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimizers.
Hi there. Thanks for this. I find this post very useful for newbies like me.
yes i agree to start seo you must read first and understand the rules of seo and the uses of SEO.
Hi,
Nice article and plz let me know how to increase traffic false website because false seo its difficult
WowI’ve never thought the plainly simple ways Google operates. The issue is that a spider indexes your page countless times, it takes a tonne of effort on your part to get your site to become relevent to the big G. This adds to my knowledge of search engine optimization.
I want to improve my SEO skills. I am glad to read this list provided by you, I am hopeful to learn a lot of good things from these blogs.
Yeah, You are right man.. For me too the best place to learn SEO is through looking for forums and blogs because they will give you basic instruction on how to work on SEO. If you wanna be excellent on SEO it would be better learn by yourself. Some tools or excellent articles or blogs on the internet can help you..
http://www.seopaathshala.com
Very insightful! Hopefully you continue producing content like this.
Thanks for sharing great blog
keep such a nice blogs
Thanks for this post, answers a bunch of questions I was having.
Hi admin,
I have been a reader for matt cutts and SEOBOOK. By the way, as talking about SEO, why are permalinks of this blog not been changed? But, even though you do not change your permalinks to more friendly for SE, I notice you still get great traffics. It must have been great contents you provide. Thanks for your sharing.
Very solid points. Thanks. I have been meaning to change the permalinks of this blog to pretty URLs but afraid to lose the rankings in many of the keywords. as of now, I am getting 65 percent of my traffic from search engines. In fact, this blog performs better in terms of search engine ranking than my other blogs that make use of pretty URLs. So why should I bother changing the permalink structure? I am thinking having long custom URLs is not a good thing for SEO. That’s just an assumption, though.
Thanks again for your more sharing,
Yeah, I get one more point of view about SEO here right now. For a long time I get so many tutorials on SEO that command me for create “custom pretty permalink structure” at the first time when I create a blog. But now, I see very very clearly that you get great traffic (65%) from SE with your default permalink structure. So, great contents can beat any kind of custom pretty permalink structure. What a great undiscovered fact for me!
I hope you do not mind answering if I have other questions on SEO.
i am realy thankful for providing such an amazing blogs.
This is great material. Keep it up it is helping us all.
This is definitely a great list that I have to check out one of these days. Thanks for sharing this post. If you get the chance, feel free to visit my site.