A list of the best SEO blogs

Because the search engines seems to evolve at warp speed, the only way to keep up is to read the best SEO blogs - the value is that each blog author usually has an insight into what is going on that others have overlooked. Taken together they provide a good insight into how search engines work at a given moment.

Here is a short list of my favourite SEO blogs:

SEO Theory is the blog of Michael Martinez, who is Director of Search Strategies at Visible Technologies, Inc. in Seattle. He's been doing this since 1996, so has pretty much seen the search engine industry develop from it's infancy.

He tends to take a top level view, looking at strategy from the search engine's point of view, analysing the objectives of Google, Yahoo and Bing and then looking at how this affects web publishers and search engine consultants. This makes for a pretty deep read and if you are really interested in how search engines work, his blog is a must.

He's also very much in favour of optimizing for all the main three search engines instead of just optimizing for Google.

In my opinion, his best post is The Infallible SEO Option

SEO Book is one of the longest standing SEO sites on the net. It's run by a group that sells SEO consultancy and training services.

However, included on the site is a blog, which is full of interesting insights into the industry.

My favourite post is a recent one - 20-25% of Google queries have never been searched before. Actually that's not the real title of that post, - but my re-written title gives you a better idea of the content!

SEO by the sea is a blog by Bill Slawski, which specialises in looking at Google patents. Most of us ignore the hundreds of patents that google is awarded each year, but Bill trawls through them all, looking for nuggets that give clues to how G's algorithm works.

There are too many good posts on his site for me to pick one - so I recommend you get a cup of coffee, click through and just browse through his site.

Occam's Razor is a blog about metrics and analytics. If you are a data person, love stats and you want to know what to track in your online business, how to track and which tools to use, this blog is pretty much the go-to place to learn all about it.

Beginners should start with this post on webanalytics 101

Matt cutts nowadays spends most of his time writing about various challenges he's doing to lose weight, raise money for charity etc etc.

But his old early posts contain many gems concerning coding on your website and insights into how Google works.

My favourite post of his is this one on whether you should use dashes or underscores.