Friday’s SEO Site of the Week

All right then. Here’s one for the big dogs. Google’s Webmaster Central is a favorite stop for almost all the SEOs I know. Coming straight from the mouth of the Almighty Goog, these tools, how-tos, reports, and Official Google policy information will make anybody who works with websites look good.

Of particular interest to Search Optimizers:

• Webmaster Guidelines
• Search results, explained
• About sitemaps
• And access to the whole giant panoply of Google services and tools, much of which you’ve never heard, but still rocks the shite none-the-less

The only cost of accessing this resource is a Google Account. Which is free. Which you already have, if you’ve got Gmail, or Google Docs, or any of the neato-keeno Google things that they’ve been bestowing on us mortals for the last ten years or so.

There’s an even better Google Webmaster secret superhero lair, the Webmaster Toolkit. That’s where the SEO gold lives.  But it’s also another site, for another Friday.

Let’s give Webmaster Central a matched set of seven clicks.

Friday’s SEO Site of the Week

All righty then! Happy Friday everybody! Today’s SEO site of the Week award goes to a veritable treasure trove of useful and interesting search marketing information, Search Engine Land, more specifically, Search Engine Land’s SEO section, which is way relevant to our mission and we all know how important relevance is.

Search Engine Land has collected a great huge pile of SEO-related stories, advice articles, how-tos, and explanations-of.  As the producers of SMX, Search Marketing’s premier international conference, they have access to some of the best thinking available on the subject. Check it out. And if you’re serious about SEO and can get the scratch together, I’d suggest also checking out SMX.

SMX—Search Marketing Expo

Seattle, Washington
June 7&8, 2011

All-in-all, Search Engine Land receives five clicks, one bat, one hat, and that’s that.

Friday’s SEO Site of the Week

If you have any interest in SEO at all, you should either be or get familiar with the name Rand Fishkin. Rand got into SEO around 2002 (one year after I did, in case anyone’s keeping track) and quickly developed into one of SEO’s most authoritative voices.  Conference speaker, book author, world traveler, and founder of SEOMoz, one of the industry’s most enduring and recognizable brands.

SEOMoz hawks a tiered set of  pay-to-play SEO “intelligence” software packages. I’ve never tried the subscription stuff, and don’t think I ever will. I am, it seems, fundamentally opposed to paying for subscription SEO services. Unless it’s YOU paying ME. Still, the data their software collects and reports on does look useful—I just don’t see how even the low-end package justifies the spend. So just to be clear, I am not recommending any of the SEOMoz products although I’m sure they work well for a lot of people. Actually, I’m not NOT recommending them either. If SEOMoz wants to give me a free trial, I’ll be happy to do a review.

What I do recommend—and heartily—is Friday’s SEO Site of the Week: the SEOMoz Blog. This blog has been running continuously for at least 7 years now. At first, it was Rand at the helm, delivering search marketing insights with flair and insight. He still posts pretty regularly, but now the blog has expanded to include other staffers and the occasional guest poster. Always a good read, and frequently the leading voice on topics of immense importance to SEOers, SEOMoz Blog is definitely worth a bookmark.

I’ll give it a few clicks and a bat or two.

Friday’s SEO Site of the Week

This week’s site is Webmasterworld, a humble forum that can be described as probably the richest source of information about the web anywhere on the web. Online since 1996, Webmasterworld has been a kind of class secretary of the internet, accumulating facts, conjectures, theories, plans, strategies, issues, bugs, ideas, rumors, flame wars, warnings, hacks, ego trips, how-tos, quick fixes, panic attacks, knowledge, inferences, fear mongering, analyses, mea culpas, martyr complexes, innuendos, information, personalities, apocrypha, and the tattered souls of webheads from every corner of the world wide webs.

A Google search for “site:webmasterworld.com” just got me over 2,000,000 pages of content. The true scope is probably much, much grander.

That’s a pretty big dawg.

Not all of this awesomeness is devoted to search marketing, of course. The topics covered here  are as endless as cyberspace. Still, just to keep this blog on some sort of track, it must be noted that the sections devoted to SEO are numerous, diverse, and beyond all, exceeding useful.

Want to know the latest Google update scuttlebutt? Webmasterworld has a Google section that contains over a million posts. Robust marketing section. Bunch of Yahoo stuff. Much ado about everything. Over 38,000 posts on link building, for crying out loud.

So there it is.  Big old pile of forum posts, some useful, some information, some amusing, some not-so-much. Most of this can be accessed for free, by anyone. They do have a subscription paywall that provides some additional benefit and helps support the site. For $150 a year, you get:

• Access to the private supporters forum. It is made up of some of the best professionals in the business in a more relaxed atmosphere.
• An ad free environment if we should add advertising.
• A special discounted Supporters Only rate to all WebmasterWorld hosted conferences.
• Access to WebmasterWorld ToolSet including: Keyword Density Analyzer, robots.txt Validator, Spider Simulator, Browser Header Checker, and the Server Header Checker.

I cannot recommend (or commend) Webmasterworld enough. I give it One Click, times 2 million.

Friday’s SEO Site of the Week

Ready for it? The Site of the Week this week goes to SEO Quake. Remember a couple of week ago I told you about a Firefox plugin called the SEO Book Fabulous Extension for Firefox? And I said

I used this extension this a lot back when I was first getting my feet wet in the SEO swamp. I’ve moved on to some more sophisticated tools, but still recommend the SEO Book extension for Firefox heartily.

Well, SEO Quake is one of the things I moved on to.

This sucker rocks. When installed and running, it gives you an SEO run-down on every site you visit, in an easy to digest data row at the top of the usable browser window.  At a glance, you get current PageRank™, number of pages indexed by Google, Yahoo, and Bing, number of backlinks, Alexa rank, domain age, and links to more, more, more.  Click the “Info” link and you get keywords and keyword phrases in use, along with their density.

Even better! When you do a search for something, it gives you quick running breakdown of stats on every site in the search results!!!! Now that’s an awesome power.

Not only do you get all that, but this extension can be modded to show Google trend data. I find it all quite useful.

If you’re past the “title & meta tags” stage of SEO, you def want this. Let’s give it one of everything, twice.

A Click, Gary the Bat, a Wizard’s Hat

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Friday’s SEO Site of the Week

This week’s site o’ the week is one bad …. (shut yo mouth). SearchEngineWatch has for years been the largest, most reliable, and most authoritative voice in the ethersphere when it comes to all things search engine.

They publish free newsletters, newsfeeds, articles, a hugely informative blog, and maintain a search engine forum where many of the web’s biggest search brains congregate to cogitate, converse, and coruscate about every imaginable search engine topic.

And if you want to see just how far down the rabbit hole goes, you can sign up for a Premium Membership, where you will be initiated into the Arcane Order of Search Marketeers, privy at last to all the secrets of the SEO.

In short, one badass SEO website. Don’t leave home without it.

I give it all the clicks, plus one wizard hat (with the wizard still inside it).

 

Friday’s SEO Site of the Week

This week, we’re going to highlight a page inside a site, SEO Book, which is not a bad site in whole, either. And more than just a page, it’s a downloadable tool that every practitioner of SEO should seriously not leave home without. I’m talking about the SEO Book’s fabulous SEO Extension for Firefox.

I used this extension this a lot back when I was first getting my feet wet in the SEO swamp. I’ve moved on to some more sophisticated tools, but still recommend the SEO Book extension for Firefox heartily.

Here are the main features:

• PR: (Google PageRank)
• Age: age pulled from Archive.org
• Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain)
• .edu Link: (Yahoo! .edu linkdomain )
• .edu Page Link: (Yahoo! .edu link )
• .gov Link: (Yahoo! .gov linkdomain )
• Page Links: (Yahoo! link)
• del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us
• Technorati: estimated total number of links to a site from blogs
• Alexa: rank based on website traffic
• Cached: (Google site:) number of pages indexed by Google
• dmoz: number of pages listed in DMOZ and number of pages referenced in DMOZ
• Bloglines: number of subscribers to a blog
• dir.yahoo.com: Yahoo! Directory listing
• WhoIs: easylook up for data for any site

We’ll give it three mouse clicks and Gary.

Friday’s SEO Site of the Week

Our SEO Site of the Week goes to Matt Cutts’s Blog.

Who the heck is Matt Cutts, you ask? Good question. Let me explain.

Suppose you were interested in successfully ranking your favorite keywords in Google. Suppose further that you wanted to gather all the information possible about what to do, what not to do, and what not to EVER EVER do?

Then ask yourself: “What would it be worth to have a guy inside Google who is willing to share official and semi-official Google thinking on the subject of SEO?” Admit it, whether your hat is black, gray or white, that sort of inside scoop would be golden.

Matt’s that guy.  He’s been with Google since 2000. He’s the head of the Google Spam Team. And while his blog is definitely not an official Mouth of Google, it is pretty much the Company Line. Which is good. Because we know all sorts of places to get the speculation, innuendo, rumor, sky-is-falling, fear-mongering, and fabrications about Google, their plans and strategies and policies, but Matt is one of the few places to go for a reasonably intelligent discussion from inside the walls.

I follow the blog and subscribe to his twitter feed. You could definitely learn something here.

Three mouse clicks, two hats, and a bat named Gary

Friday’s SEO Site of the Week

Our first SEO Site of the Week spotlight goes to SEO Chat. Been coming to this site for years.  The sheer magnitude of search marketing information contained within the pages of this site is by turns impressive and intimidating.

Here’s a sample of what’s available:

• SEO articles and tutorials covering just about every SEO topic you can think of, written by some of the best minds in Search today.
• SEO tools–at least 50 and growing, everything from keyword suggesters to analyzers to various generators. Like the Home Depot of search marketing.
• SEO Chat forums, thousands of threads, hundreds of thousands of comments. It would take you six years just to read all the thread titles.

And all packaged in a very user-friendly, no unnecessary stuff design that is easy-peasy to get around in.

All-in-all, SEO Chat is one of the very best places to go for information on search marketing and optimization. No kidding, this site belongs in the bookmarks of every professional SEO and every interested amateur as well.

Five mouse clicks and one magic hat for good measure.