Free SEO help is plentiful on the Internet. The trick isn’t finding help, but winnowing out the good help from all the mediocre or outright dangerous help out there. Here are some tips from an experienced webmaster. The first place to look for help with search engine optimization is from the search engines themselves. All the larger search engines have blogs whose contributors are members of the search engine’s programming team and whose goal is to help webmasters optimize sites for that particular search engine. Often contributing writers spend time on webmastering forums to learn what problems working webmasters are having, so the articles are timely and practical, not theoretical. The quickest way to locate search engines’ blogs is to search for “blog” or “official blog” and the name of the search engine. Forums are a good, but tricky, source of free SEO help. On one hand, webmasters’ accounts of their experiences and the ensuing debates are indispensable. Experienced webmasters can sense when changes are likely, analyze changes after they happen, and explain the ramifications of legal language and trends with a freedom that official corporate bloggers rarely have. and, of course, without corporate bloggers’ need to protect the search engines’ interests. Webmasters can also discuss patterns they have noticed in search engine behavior that search engines refuse to discuss or outright deny. On the other hand, forum members also toss out reams of unfounded speculation, bad advice, and outright blather. How to you work out which forums and which forum members are worth reading? There is no substitute for familiarizing yourself with a few forums and watching them over time. Seeing whether an official speaker for a given search engine is a member of the forum is a good idea as well. Official speakers are not stamps of quality, but they do mean the forum is significant enough that the search engine is willing to spend resources on it. The two forums you should definitely put on your watch list are WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint. To fill out your lists of forums to watch, Google for “SEO forum. ”
Free SEO help articles are equally hard to sift through: There are a lot of good ones out there, and an exponentially larger number of bad, dangerous, or merely tired and rehashed ones. Avoid article directories and “experts” whose main area of expertise is grinding out several dozen SEO articles a week. Look for industry magazines and real experts, webmasters with well known networks of sites. Also look for smaller, private article collections and blogs written by experts, like the blog at HubShout. Avoid any articles that sound dull, rewritten, or stuffed with keywords. As you can see, getting the best from the available free SEO help takes judgment and a touch of experience on your part as well as the ability to use a search engine. Go slowly and develop your knowledge base, and soon you will be able to sift out the worthwhile free SEO help.