Come Dine at the Search Engine and Marketing Smorgasbord

If you are like me, you may spend a bit too much time trying to keep up with the latest industry news and trends regarding search engines optimization and marketing. It’s certainly fair to say there is an avalanche of information out there with more added each day. As such, when I read about recently released Pipes, a feed aggregator (and manipulator) from Yahoo!, I thought it may be a more efficient way to keep up on the latest articles and research.

What Pipes allows you to do is get a bunch of different data feeds and create a mashup. Now you can get really creative with these such as combining several feeds, finding posts with a high number of views or comments, filter out duplicates, and show only the first 50 posts such as this mashup of digg, del.ico.us, reddit and slashdot. What I wanted to do was bring together some of the top SEO and Marketing blogs and put them all in one place for busy merchants to read. So here is the feed I put together called the Search Engine Smörgåsbord, one part search engine optimization, one part online marketing, spiced liberally with comments, and served fresh.

So what blogs are included? I pulled the top SEO blogs from Search Engine Journal’s top SEO blogs of 2006.*

• SEOmoz
• SERoundtable
• SEOBook
• Stuntdubl
• SEO by the Sea

Then I added top online marketing blogs pulled from Todd And’s Power 150 list. I didn’t pull the exact top five blogs here, but rather five that I felt had a lot of posts which would benefit small business owners/marketers.

• Duct Tape Marketing
• Copyblogger
• PronetAdvertising
• MarketingProfs Daily Fix
• Online Marketing Blog

So if this sounds interesting you can subscribe to the Search Engine Smörgåsbord and read the aggregated posts from the above blogs in your favorite newsreader. Now before you cry out in stunned disbelief and set your fingers flying to post a comment that I left out dozens of notable and worthy blogs in each category realize this—it’s only a starting point. The best part about Pipes is it is collaborative. You can edit my list to remove feeds or add feeds as you see fit. If you do, come back and post the link to your pipe and why you added particular blogs. In short, what dish are you bringing to the Smörgåsbord?

Also, and perhaps quite importantly, I recommend visiting each of the above sites and spending time there to read the archives and full-length articles. The blogs will keep you up on the latest news, but you should really peruse them in their natural environment so to speak to get the full benefit of them.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

* Astute observers will note Matt’s absence from the list despite his presence in the top 5. This is not to discount Matt’s contribution to understanding search engines (which is massive and highly beneficial). Rather, this is more an acknowledgment that his blog is not specifically about SEO in the way that the others are, and more so that he is like EF Hutton—when he talks, people listen. As such, most of you likely have his blog bookmarked already.