By:John Carcutt

Source: appliedseo.com

One of the most important aspects of being an SEO is staying on top of the game. In this industry, more than any other that I can think of at the moment, the rules change on a regular basis. To remain a viable SEO you need access to this information and you need to know it is reliable. You can test and re-test to determine the changes yourself, but this would be a huge undertaking. Fortunately, we have a thriving online community in the SEO space to help you uncover this knowledge. Unfortunately, not everyone in this community follows the same ethical or professional standards. So finding good information can be tricky at times.The three most basic avenues of information gathering in this field are SEO News sites or Newsletters, SEO Blogs, and most popular of all SEO Forums. Both the blogs and News related sites are very convenient. Someone else gathers the information and collects it under one roof.

It’s basically up to you to find sources that are reliable and you can count on. Anyone can start one of these, so it is VERY important to know who is providing you the information. You can get bad advice from these types of site just as easily as you can get good. I can emphasize enough, know the source and until you are sure, verify anything you read.

Using a forum is usually the most up to date way to keep informed on SEO changes. They are the most visited of all SEO professional sites and the conversations on topics tend to allow for a better understanding of issues as apposed to a singular perspective of an article or blog post. There are now many SEO forums and new ones appearing all the time. But, as I will emphasize over and over in this article, be very careful of whom you read. Reading in the wrong place can hamper your ability to learn proper SEO and feed you information that, while it seems legitimate, is actually very harmful.

I feel the need to give you some examples. I want to look at the extreme ends of the spectrum. One forum who has in the past actually admitted they don’t mind spammers posting is Threadwatch.org. While it has grown in popularity, its main driving force in my opinion is its controversial members and topics. It is not what I would call a good source of SEO related information. But many, unfortunately, may not know the difference and learn something there they might get them in trouble in the future. On the other hand, The IHelpYou Forums* have gotten a reputation of being “White Hat Zealots”. They will not put up with any type of spamming or unethical search technique and have consistently “outed” SEO spammers. This forum is dedicated to ethics in search and will go well above the call of duty to help members stay on top of the ethical SEO game.

If you are in the industry, you are asking yourself, “What about SearchEngineWatch, they have to be good right?”. Not so fast. Exposure does not equal good. Yes there is a huge amount of information on that site, but the forums are fairly new and basically a free for all. Almost anyone can post anything on those forums as long as it is related to SEO or Search. This means the information is not moderated for ethics, harmful techniques, spammy practices or any other number of topics that could potentially harm a practicing SEO. Yes in some cases, the harmful information will be challenged, but this is rare and I personally know people who have been banned from that site primarily because they challenged viewpoints of the moderators there. The information on those forums can be either a goldmine or a landmine. The problem is unless you are in the know already; you won’t know it’s a landmine until it blows up in your face. Here’s one example of what I am talking about at SpamWackers, Crappy Tools.

I still have not found an SEO newsletter I am comfortable recommending to anyone, most tend to be publicity machines for SEO service sites. I also have recently been seeing a lot SEO news sites “distorting” issues to make them better “sound bites” to encourage readership. So I am sorry to say I can’t recommend any of these types of sites right now. If anyone knows of a good one, please let me know.

I do have a couple of SEO Blogs on my must read list. And you will find them linked on the right side of this sites home page. But two I would like to point out. Matt Cutts has a blog he started a few months ago. Matt is a Senior Engineer at Google and has given the SEO community a direct look into the inner workings of Google. This blog is a daily stop on any top SEOs reading schedule. Another great blog is The SEO Blog. It is associated with a rather well known SEO company named StepForth and is written by Jim Hedger. Jim is one of a few prolific SEO authors around. You can find his SEO articles showing up on a wide variety of sites. Jim does a great job of gathering pertinent SEO information and keeping you on top of changes in the industry.

Again, know who you are reading, anyone can start a blog or a newsletter and if some kid with a little bit of writing flair gets all his information from the wrong source, he could do you much more harm than good. Read the wrong information on a forum and you could land in hot water. Staying on top of changes in the SEO industry is a make or brake proposition for us, making sure you have good reliable information can be the difference between success and failure in this field.

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