I’m often asked, “how do you keep up with search engine marketing?” “Isn’t it always changing, how do you know what to do?”

There’s so much free search engine marketing info, both natural and paid, on the web via newsletters, blogs, etc. that I usually don’t find it necessary to pay for informational products related to SEO.

Tools are another matter; for instance, Word Tracker is well worth the $254 yearly fee. However, for most industry information, I’ve found that reading newsletters, blogs, and occasionally browsing the forums keeps me in tune with what’s current in the industry.

If search is not the main focus of your job though, keeping up can may be a daunting task. If that’s you, here is a short blogroll (list) of the search and/or marketing blogs that I currently follow:

Bloglines Blogroll

There are thousands more, but this selection has a good mix of authoritative voices as well as others who closely follow the industry and post on what’s being discussed. If you would like the OPML file for these feeds so that you can track them yourself or add them to your feed reader, you can find it here: www.bloglines.com/public/aarondalrymple - choose the “Export Subscriptions” link on the bottom of the left hand column to add it to your own RSS reader.If you feel the need to pay for a subscription, you should check out Planet Ocean’s Search Engine News, it may be the closest to a “one-stop” resource available:
www.searchenginenews.com

In the past week I’ve also run across two fantastic, free, in-depth guides on search marketing. One focuses on natural search and one on paid search marketing.

Essential Guide to Search Engine Marketing - DM News

Defining Search Engine Relevancy - SEO Book.com

As far as forums, there are two that I actively troll. I’m not a big poster to the forums, I did for a while but it takes too much valuable time and sucks me into too many of the debates/arguments that seem to dominate the boards at times. If you need some info you can’t find anywhere else, though, you can usually find an answer in the forums. Just make sure you use the forums search function first and only post a new thread if you can’t find it already discussed. If not you will be nailed by the forum junkies that insist on taking time to tell you that you’re wasting their time by posting a question that has already been answered.

Here are the two I watch:

webmasterworld

searchenginewatch

Have a great 4th of July!


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