I love a challenge. In fact, if I don’t take on a challenge it drives me nuts. So when Darren Rowse came out with his group writing contest (project) with the topic of “Top 5”, I had to come up with an entry. I thought I would get creative and make a top 5 list of top posts from top experts in SEO.
Obviously I couldn’t cover more than 5 industry experts, as they are many more than 5. Also, if you don’t have a “Top Posts” page on your blog I couldn’t include you. Stuntdubl highly recommends you do that.
1) Michael Gray (GrayWolf) has a remarkable series on local search, but one of his top 100 posts on local search is titled 13 Ways to Promote Your Local Business for Free. He gives a comprehensive list of local search techniques and websites that anyone can make use of, no matter their budget. (Interestingly, GrayWolf’s review of SoloSEO is found on his top 100 posts page…neat!).
2) Todd Malicoat (StuntDubl) has a wealth of posts at his top posts page. One of the top posts that I will never forget is on The Link Building Cycle – 6 Steps of the Link Building Process. He goes through the entire process of building links, a great primer for anyone interested in SEO. I couldn’t leave out The SEO Playbook too, which will go down as a classic in Todd’s blog posts and SEO history.
3) In Lee Odden’s (Online Marketing Blog) most popular posts page he includes the top 10 posts in terms of traffic received. One that stood out to me is one of Lee’s signature topics, The Lowdown on Press Release Optimization. Lee was part of an excellent panel at PubCon last year on Press Releases. From his top blog post on press releases:
Other than press releases, another way to get into sites like Google news is to write articles and submit them to publication web sites and also blogs that are already getting picked up by Google newsbot. Perform a search on Google News for relevant keywords and note the sites that are getting picked up. Find out if they accept articles and press releases and submit.
4) Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz, which I prefer to pronounce as sea-moss just for fun) has a most popular ever page but you can also break it down to the past day, week, month, etc.. The top post ever related to SEO (first is his proposal) is Ranking Factors Version 2, which actually points to the actual article, but discusses its overall findings. This Ranking Factors gets help from industry experts to decide on what is important, what is not, and to what degree, in terms of ranking factors for search engine optimization. It is a must read (and must study) for everyone in SEO.
5) Brian Clark (CopyBlogger) is one of the blogs that really made a significant impact in our content business, and is a staple blog for anyone in Internet Marketing. In the sidebar of his blog he lists popular posts, and one that I love is How to Attract Links and Increase Web Traffic – The Ultimate Guide. He links out to an incredible list of resources that combat the topic of attracting links and increasing traffic. Refer to this list often, and you will find your SEO starts improving quickly.
These experts and others have provided a wealth of information for SEOs. Without much formal instruction in search engine optimization, this is where we can dive in and learn everything we can about optimizing for both users and search engines. This is one amazing facet of SEO, that SEO experts that charge thousands and thousands for this information will share it freely on their blog. It’s a fantastic community, and I have certainly grown in my knowledge by leaps and bounds just from learning from the experts.
