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Most SEO consultants do not write their blogs for non-profits and small businesses, but many of them offer great information that is applicable no matter what your website is about. Here’s a short list of who you should read and what to look for on their sites.

SugarRae: The website of Rae Hoffman who found her way into search engine visibility when she was trying to connect with other parents of children who have had pediatric strokes. I don’t recommend her site just because of her story, though as the uncle of another pediatric stroke survivor I find it meaningful. Instead, it is for the great content that she puts out on the site. I suggest non-profits and small business alike read her post Before You Launch that Local Business Website and do as she says.

Matt Cutts: If you’re not familiar with Matt Cutt’s Blog, and you want to rank well in Google, you should bookmark him. Matt is the SEO mouth piece for Google. Yes his blog is his own, but he is the messanger. Unlike say a White House press secretary, Matt isn’t just giving the company line he is active in the inner workings of Google search which is why he is one of the authors on Google’s patent application 20050071741 that lays out how historical data is used for placement in search engines. So, you want to know why your pages are marked as supplemental results in Google? Or perhaps what Google is thinking about paid links? Read Matt.

SEO Class: I don’t know if they will ever do it again, but SEO Class offered a pro bono workshop just for non-profits as a prelude to their first ever conference. Whether or not they do that again their blog is worht reading and there is even a section dedicated to non-profit issues, though at the moment it is a little sparse.

Jim Boykin : Jim has been at this game for a long time and though his children aren’t that old he’s already a granddaddy in the seo field. The thing that I appreciate about Jim is that he gives very concrete real world information. For example check out his post on how to value a page you are considering getting a link from.
Danny Sullivan: It’s not difficult to find posts by Danny Sullivan he has brought an incredible amount of energy to search engine visiblity. His latest effort is Third Door Media and one asspect of that company is the co-authored blog Search Engine Land which is a must read.

Anyone who knows search engine visibility experts knows that I have just scratched the surface here, but I am hungry, so I’ll come back to this post and fill it out some more on another day. You might think about book marking it to check out later.

Marketleap’s search engine ranking tool, which they call “Keyword Verification” tool is an average tool with nothing special to recommend it. Where their other two tools are quite helpful this tool lacks muscle. Marketleap may be quite right in asserting that most people do not search beyond the first three pages, but come on guys give us a little help, or is that hope. The tool isn’t for searchers it’s for folks tracking their progress to figure out what’s working and what isn’t. Personally, I’d like to see a tool that drills down at least through, and reports on, the first one hundred results, now that would be cool.

Marketleap has a very cool free analytic tools to track trends/history of a sites search engine saturation (how many pages a search engine has indexed). In order to track these you must establish a baseline and Read the rest of this entry »