Many people read a huge amount of blog posts each day in order to learn and stay ahead of the game in SEO. I used to read loads of posts myself from the industry leading blogs all of the time. But I think you get to a point where, despite it being great to know what’s going on out there, there’s probably only a very small percentage of this information which directly benefits how you do your job. This post from Todd Malicoat about the important things which change in SEO is definitely worth a read.
Image credit: Flickr
I’m certainly not saying don’t subscribe to these blogs – if you’re learning about search marketing you definitely should – but I’ve found that I now skim over far more posts than I used to in order to grab any information which I may find useful, new or interesting. One of the main reasons for keeping up-to-date with the latest news and interacting on sites like Twitter and Sphinn is often to build relationships and a reputation online.
But my main point is, that while reading these blogs you could quite easily learn upto 90% of what you need to know about SEO, it’s often the extra 10% which people prefer not to give away that can really help you to learn some very useful tips and tricks to push your site/clients forward that extra mile.
So what do the top bloggers do?
These people clearly know what they’re talking about, so you could probably learn a lot from what they are actually doing for themselves. Some of this things they won’t tell you, so you just need to look a bit deeper and read between the lines!
- How do Search Engine Land optimise their own site?
- What information does Matt Cutts include in his robots.txt file?
- What are the quality backlinks pointing to SEObook.com?
- How did SEOmoz actually react themselves to the change in PageRank sculpting?
- How do Mashable promote RSS subscription to users?
- When/why does traffic peak to Blogstorm?
- How do TopRankBlog promote themselves on Twitter?
- Why is the ProBlogger homepage layout formatted that way?
- What is common blog platform or URL structure used by these bloggers?
- What writing style/use of images help to make Copyblogger so popular?
- Why does Lyndon ask controversial questions which you’ve always got an opinion on?
So don’t just read about the bloggers opinions about the topics your looking to learn about, actually look at what they are doing themselves too!
I agree 100%, reading what they rite is good, but digging a little deeper to see what they are actually doing is the best way to learn.
Hey buddy even i agree on rather reading wat the top blogger write its better to find out how they do it…
Really good post. I often find myself reading a lot (thereby spending a lot of time), trying to find that tiny piece of information I didn’t know already. Many hours have been wasted, I assure you…
Superb article, it seems so obvious when you read it, who really – who would have thought to dig into matt cutts’ robots.txt etc?
Thanks :)
Thanks Carly, I’m probably just a bit nosey to be honest! ;)
Thanks for this reminder! I’m going to do some research now. I especially love the backlink filter.
Oscar
Excellent article. The secret is identifying the sites to monitor. The closer they are to your own subject matter the better. I suspect that SEO is a subject all on it’s own. The bloggers and the readers have a level of knowledge not matched in any other area.
Kevin, brilliant perspective, great questions! And 10% is always below the radar. Thanks!