The World Cup of SEO – My Top 8 Bloggers for Search

Wow! What a year will learn ya.

I looked back at one of my old blog posts called, “Amanda Vandervort’s Top 8 SEO Sites,” and realize what a rookie I was. While the post certainly has merit, it was less about SEO and more about tools that can help you create an effective website – I still use these tools with frequency so if you want to check out the post, it’s still a good resource.

But after a year into this whole blogging adventure, I’ve taken particular interest in Search Engine Optimization, or SEO (check out the bits below for some insight), and follow a couple people specifically online. They’ve each put together interesting and informative sites that are packed full of must-reads for anybody who reads, writes, publishes or views content online. So I wanted to share them with you.

http://www.sugarrae.com – Never Mess with a Woman who can Pull Rank

http://www.stuntdubl.com – Gettin’ Hit by Traffic, not Cars.

http://www.wolf-howl.com – Graywolf’s SEO Blog.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog – A blog by the head of Google’s webspam team.

http://searchengineland.com – A composite blog with a couple of my personal SEO faves.

http://www.seroundtable.com – The Pulse of the Search Community.

http://www.seobook.com/blog – Learn. Rank. Dominate.

http://yoast.com – Tweaking Websites.

No matter what industry you’re in (heck, I’m a soccer-junkie), SEO is a vital part of the online marketplace. Here’s a little info via a mix of the Wikipedianator with a splash of Vandervort.

SEO 101 – Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” search results. Sometimes we also refer to it as “organic” search. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search engine results page (SERP), the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. This gives a web site web presence, so you can imagine how important it is to anybody who uses a website either as a business, or as a marketing tool for their business.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website involves a ton of stuff, but primarily you could say editing its content, organization and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

The acronym “SEO” can also refer to “search engine optimizers,” a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients or by employees who perform SEO services in-house. This pretty much describes the super-duper rock-stars I linked to above.

Do you have more SEO’s you think should be in the game? Let me know – maybe we can field a full squad. Happy Optimizing :-)