Search Engine Forums

A range of different search engine discussion forums can be found on the Web. These vary in both focus and quality, but if you find the right ones they are invaluable sources of information.

Most are free to join and worth spending time visiting. Usually it's best to 'lurk' for a while and read the FAQ before launching in with questions which may well have been answered many times before.

As I mentioned, the forums do vary. Some have a high noise to quality ratio and feature a lot of grandstanding and ranting - the inane "ihelpyou" forum being the worst in this regard. Other forums are well moderated and allow different ideas and opinions to be discussed.

Here are several search engine forums we regularly visit and participate in.

Search Engine World Forums
Widely recognised as the best discussion forum on the Web for professional search engine marketers. Forums are often very technical in nature and cover a wide range of search engine related topics moderated by leading SEO professionals. Participation is free, although there is now also a private area available only by subscription. Search Engine World is strongly moderated and some don't like this. To keep things objective they do not allow any form of self promotion and website critiques whereas other forums do. Highly recommended for intermediate to advanced search engine marketers.

Cre8asite Forums
Also very good, especially the forums moderated by "Black Knight" (Ammon Johns) & Web Diversity (Jim Banks). Free subscription.

SearchEngineWatch Forum
Another very good forum - many of the top SEOs participate in it, which isn't surprising given Danny Sullivan's involvement. Danny is a recognised search engine expert & runs the Search Engine Strategies conferences that get run around the world. Free subscription.

There are other good forums, but these are our favourites.

WARNING

The biggest drawback to forums is the vast amount of time they can consume as you sift through them finding nuggets of information. This can be a real trap, especially if you are new to SEO.

To avoid it the quickest way to get up to speed is to first read a good SEO book to get to grips with the basics, then use forums. That way you can focus on topics of interest and also separate the wheat from the chaff that inevitably litters forums. The SEO book shown below is one we highly recommend.