Continuing our top 5 series we are focusing on search engine optimisation (SEO) websites this month. All the websites below have a slightly different focus within the SEO community and offer valuable information, strategies and examples to help you become a better SEO.

SEOMoz

Rand Fishkin is something of a SEO hero of mine, if only for his charismatic performances on the now legendary ‘Whiteboard Fridays’. SEOmoz has a lot to offer SEOs of all levels and its premium membership offer a variety of useful keyword, rankings and linking tools. The recent Linkscape tool despite its recent controversy is particularly useful.

SEO Book

SEO Book.com is a leading SEO blog by Aaron Wall covering the search marketing arena. It offers marketing tips, search analysis and his SEO book is probably the best out there. Like SEOmoz Aaron also features a premium members subscription that has had some great feedback.

SEO Blackhat

Some insightful information about ‘Blackhat’ SEO, linkbait & link spamming. Some of these tactics are highly dangerous and I wouldn’t recommend using them on any serious projects however it is important to be aware of what the latest black hat techniques are.

SEO Roundtable

A vibrant search marketing community that features forums dedicated to Google, Yahoo and MSN optimisation as well as all the latest search marketing news and developments.

Search Engine War

Great blog from the team at Guava which offers some insightful comments on SEO and PPC best practise, optimisation techniques and social media strategies.

I thought I would put a post together featuring some of the really useful videos that Matt Cutts (Head of Web Spam at Google) posts on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog as well as some other great interviews at various conferences.
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It looks like Google’s latest algorithm tweak is making the news. This interesting article in the Sydney Morning Herald again features Darren Rowse and Yaro Starak. Both advise “…that website operators need to become less reliant on Google for both traffic and revenue.” more…

Well I don’t know what’s going on at Google at the moment but once again they are creating a major stir with their latest PageRank shakeup. There are a lot of theories as to why Google is re-ranking many blogs and websites and most centre around Google taking issue with the selling of text links and excessive interlinking within blog networks. I can understand the issue with the selling of text links as this essentially goes against Google’s preference for natural linking methods and goodness knows what this means for companies such as Text Link Ads. Could their days be numbered? more…

Man, it seems that every blog in existence these days has a Blogrush widget on it. Saying It’s really taken off is an understatement to say the least (Blogrush served 40,000,000 headlines in its first 5 days). more…

I came across this lovely little video on portfolio.com today which demonstrates very clearly how Google works. It basically takes you through each step in making a search on the world’s number one search engine and explains, in a simple way, how Google goes about producing results so quickly. Very enlightening indeed.

View the “How Google Works” video

I get asked all the time how to set up websites that will get traffic and ultimately be successful so I thought I would document the process here in the form of a quickstart best practise style guide. It’s by no means definitive but will get you started in the right direction. more…