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A Primer of Free SEO Help
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 is a brief guide from a veteran webmaster.
The search engines themselves are the first place you should look for information about search engine optimization. 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, forum members' discussions of their experiences and observations are indispensable. Webmasters with experience often know when algorithm changes are about to take place, and can discuss changes, legal issues, and other SEO issues freely and without the corporate constraints and need to protect the search engine's interests that the search engines' own bloggers have. 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? It comes down to reading a wide selection of forums and noting patterns over time. Focusing on forums frequented by official speakers for search engines is also a good idea. 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. Two must have forums are WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint. To fill out your lists of forums to watch, Google for "SEO forum."
Free SEO help articles are similarly tricky: 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.
