3 SEO Expert Blogs You Should Be Reading Right Now
SEO shouldn’t be mysterious or intimidating. These SEO expert blogs provide terrific — and easy — access points to both detailed and big picture advice.
For too many marketers, SEO is something that other people do — it’s either outsourced or perhaps relegated to an in-house specialist. That’s unfortunate because SEO should really inform your overall marketing strategy in addition to vice versa. The more informed your entire team is, the easier it will be to fully integrate your digital marketing efforts. And in this day and age that’s paramount to success.
What’s the best way to educate your team, encourage their engagement, and put them on an accelerated learning curve? Why to break down their misconceptions about SEO and remove the (largely perceived) barriers to entry, of course. And the best way to do that? Point them to resources that are not only informative, but also accessible. It certainly doesn’t hurt if they have a healthy dose of engaging personality, to boot.
These SEO experts will be the first to tell you SEO doesn’t have to be left up to the likes of them. They come from entrepreneur as well as SEO backgrounds, and they’re no stranger to having to quickly pick up and master competencies outside their areas of expertise. That’s what makes them so effective in writing to a core SEO audience and more general readers, alike.
What I love about each of these three SEO expert bloggers is their ability to get down and dirty with advanced SEO techniques in one post, while pulling back and taking on bigger-picture marketing issues in the next. They’re bloggers who should absolutely be on your must-read list for valuable SEO, marketing, and entrepreneur insight.
Rand Fishkin, Co-founder of SEOmoz and Inbound.org
Blog: Rand’s Blog
When it comes to SEO advice and news it doesn’t get much better than SEOmoz. The SEO software company serves as a model for building audience engagement, having developed a vibrant online community around its company blog and even more so with the addition of its YouMoz blog, featuring user-generated content (when your users are engaged to the point they’re creating a wellspring of high-quality content for you, you’re doing something right).
It only makes sense to include co-founder and CEO Rand Fishkin on this list then, right? The guy’s a prolific blogger and by this point, practically synonymous with SEO. But the reason his personal blog might be a bit of a stretch is that, most of the time, it’s not really about SEO. In fact, it’s more about what it’s like to start and run a company — topics include funding, scaling, branding, hiring (and sometimes having to fire) team members, and more personal subjects like work/life balance.
Why you should follow:
So, ok, not strictly a SEO blog, but a fantastic resource for founders and anyone who works at a startup/expansion-stage company. Rand’s dedication to transparency results in some invaluable insights into inner business workings and bigger-picture entrepreneur issues, and when SEO does come up, you can rest assured you’re learning from one of the best.
Favorite posts:
Neil Patel, Co-founder of Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics
Blog: Quick Sprout
Neil Patel may not be the most humble (check out his Twitter bio) but he’s also got a fair deal to brag about — he was named one of the top influencers online by the Wall Street Journal and a top entrepreneur by Entrepreneur Magazine. All by the time he was 21. What I love about his blog, QuickSpout.com, though, is his no non-sense approach to breaking down SEO and online marketing topics that have the potential to be extremely complicated, and churning out posts that offer clear and practical tips you can put to use right away.Why you should follow:
Neil has a great sense of what SEO issues marketers are really grappling with day-to-day, but in addition to the with-you-down-in-the-trenches advice he can also zoom out and speak to bigger-picture issues from the vantage point of an experienced co-founder and entrepreneur.
Every time I visit Quick Sprout I find something worth following up on and implementing. If you haven’t already, check it out to see for yourself. Just don’t try emailing him.
Favorite posts:
Jason Acidre, CEO of Xight Interactive
Blog: Kaiser the Sage
Back when I was first becoming involved with OpenView’s SEO efforts, I was searching everywhere for practical SEO advice that was the right mix of approachable and substantial. It was easy for a lot of material to go over my head, but I also wanted to dive deeper than a lot of the basic intro “You should pick and use the right keywords!” type of advice allowed. I started noticing a kind of strange name popping up in my searches and on Twitter, and once I looked into it further it wasn’t long before I was reading Jason Acidre AKA Kaiser the Sage’s blog regularly.
Why you should follow:
For me, as a non-expert looking for quick and dirty tips to help me get up to speed quickly, the Sage was and still is an invaluable resource. The focus of Jason’s blog posts is often on link building, and I can’t recommend the blog enough if you’re looking for detailed info and actionable tips on the subject. But he also zooms out to explore other topics such as user experience and inbound marketing, and does a great job of covering how they overlap and intersect with SEO.
Favorite posts:
There are a ton of great SEO bloggers and resources out there, and this is obviously just a small sampling. Where else should marketers go to pick up accessible, actionable SEO advice? Who else is producing great SEO/online marketing content?
Tags: Search engine optimization, Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz, Marketing, Web search engine, Web Design and Development, Business, Marketing and Advertising
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