My Personal Favorite Search Engine Marketing Resources

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I know a number of readers of you who read my posts prefer to do a lot of the Internet Marketing work yourself rather than hire an Internet Marketing agency.

This after all is one of the reasons why I provide the level of information I do at this site. It’s all about being self-sufficient. But there’s come a time when to move forward you have to move up and this involves work – sometimes hard work.

If you have the time to perform this work, or at least manage others to do it for you,  as well as running your business, then I say great! Go for it!

For those of you with this technical desire then today I’m going to share with you some resources that have helped me over the years and one of them is free.

SEO Fast Start – Dan Thies:

Let’s start out with the free resource. Dan Thies’ SEO Fast Start eBook is by no means a quick high-level view of SEO. Dan Thies is one of the masters in the SEO world and provides complete information on getting your web site ranked in the search engines.

The eBook covers all the basic SEO concepts from choosing keywords to optimizing your web site, and performing off-page SEO. Dan Thies is also a master at link building a concept he teaches in getting a site ranked high.  Dan is known as teaching only “white hat” SEO, which means he does not try and fool the search engines to get better rankings – this is known as “black hat” and can get you penalized and even banned by the search engines.

If you adopt all the stuff contained in his SEO book you’ll likely not need to do too much else for a few years, and in the local marketing arena will “kick the butt” of most of your competitors.

Dan was an original faculty member at StomperNet but most recently has worked closely with Leslie Rohde, another big name in the SEO arena.

Google’s Best Practices Guide – Jerry West:

Jerry West’s Google Best Practices Guide is up to about 190 pages these days. He just released a new version in November, 2010. Jerry is a character and not afraid to take on any other guru or even Google.

Jerry doesn’t spend anytime covering the other search engines as he feels compared to Google they’re nowhere.

I’d characterize his SEO material as being the next level from Dan Thies’ Fast Start eBook. Jerry gets into detailed technical information on SEO quickly but you’ll find his eBook well researched and easy to read.

Jerry doesn’t believe anything anybody says unless he can prove it himself – and he has the skills and capabilities to do that. Over the years Jerry has accumulated 644 web sites he uses to test out theories and validate research or propaganda put out by the search engines. The guide requires a lot of work to implement and no promises of instant results in the search engines but you’ve heard enough of that B.S. from places like Yellow Pages, City Search, etc.

Jerry does have some sections in the guide specific to Local Marketing for a small business. Jerry was also a former faculty member at StomperNet.

Access to Jerry’s materials won’t break the bank and at a one-time cost $97 with lifetime upgrades it’s one of the best investments you can make. Occasionally he runs specials with a 50% discount.

Search Engine News:

The folks at Planet Ocean have a membership site, but I’ve found their monthly subscription service called Search Engine News offers the best value. For an annual fee of $144 or $12 per month, you receive a comprehensive monthly report you can print covering all the major news in Search Engine land over the previous month.

These are not skinny reports of 15 or16 pages. The shortest I’ve ever received is 36 pages and occasionally when they have lots of articles it can run over 60 pages, and packed full of gems you’d otherwise miss.

It’s a great and time efficient way of keeping abreast of latest developments by the major search engines. Rather than keep tabs on a multitude of blogs each week yourself they do it for you, and filter out the good stuff from the hype.

I also like they cover the local business Internet Marketing scene and I admit occasionally I “steal” their news for you – but not their words.

SEO Brain Trust:

The SEO Brain Trust is a paid monthly membership site owned and run by Dan Thies and Leslie Rohde. The audience here is primarily people who do SEO for a living. That is people like me, who want access to a couple of the best minds in the businesses to help them with their thorny customer’s SEO problems.

However, there are plenty of online business owners who benefit from the information in the SEO Brain Trust portal and with weekly coaching calls performed by Leslie and Dan you have a forum to ask your toughest SEO related questions – and know they’ll get answered.

Also in the membership site are videos and audio files as well as documents covering basic and advanced techniques. If you enjoyed Dan’s Fast Start book then his material in this portal is wide and deep. If Dan is the right brain of the relationship then Leslie is the left brain. Leslie is an engineer and articulate at getting his ideas across but be prepared to get down in the weeds of how things work in search engine land.

The material in the SEO Brain Trust is top quality and as good as any you’ll find in SEO land. But it is for serious students of SEO who want to learn how to do things the right way to add value to the Internet and not get banned. Membership costs $297 per month… when it is open for new members.

What’s Next:

You should check out each of these resources if you intend to be a serious student of Internet marketing, and want to learn to do your own SEO. It’s also worthwhile learning enough, through these resources, so if you decide to hire a consultant or agency you understand what’s involved and can make good choices about who to hire.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this list and as I come across other SEO and Local Internet marketing resources I feel comfortable recommending I will share them with you.

BTW: None of the links to these products are affiliate links. I don’t get paid any money for recommending them and have no personal relationship with these people.

Cliff Calderwood
New England Local Marketing
5 Goss Pond Road, Suite 200
Upton, Massachusetts 01568
cliff@nelocalmarketing.com
508 479 2840

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