The Click Depot Blog

There are several search engine optimization books in the market. But this field is so volatile that no book can remain current for longer than about 6 months. Hence the best choices are the ebooks that keep releasing new versions regularly. Here are our choices.

3. Brad Callen’s Search Engine Optimization Made Easy: If you are new to SEO and just need the basics, this FREE ebook is the way to go. The ideas are presented in a clear concise manner and Brad Callen is a known name in Search Engine Optimization. He tries to promote his SEO Elite and Keyword Elite software with this book. Both are excellend tools for SEO, though these days there are other tools such as Aaron Wall’s Backlink Analyzer and the Wordtracker account which are cheaper and almost offer the same functionality. He also has a similar Ebook called Adwords Made Easy for Google Adwords Pay per Click marketing.

2. SEO Insites - Unfair Advantage eBook: Great ebook. Discusses some pretty interesting techniques. GREAT for amateurs. Even professionals may find some new ideas, but not too many. Their http://www.seoinsites.com membership is much more useful but expensive at $150/month. The book costs $97 and is included in the membership if you get that instead.

1. Aaron Wall’s SEO Book: This is the most popular SEO Ebook on the Internet. He updates it and relases new versions periodically. Aaron Wall is an intelligent SEO and a smart business peson. This book at $79 is worth the money if you are serious about SEO for your website or looking to establish an SEO business.

Whether you do SEO for your one website or manage an entire portfolio, you know two things. 1 - Quality backlinks are the number 1 way to achieve a higher search engine rank. 2 - You need tools to quickly identify quality backlinks and rapidly implement your link building campaign.

Now there are hundreds of SEO tools out there. I am not going to try and cover everything, just the top five seo tools that will get you everything you need to get started on a link building campaign without spending a penny.

5. Mike’s Free Search Engine Rankings Tool

If you don’t have a tool yet, please get one. It is way too time consuming to keep going back the the search interface and search for where your site shows up on the results. There are several free and paid tools out there that can make your life easier. This is one thing in which the paid professional tools do seem to offer much better functionality than the free ones. The paid ones like IBP 9 and Web CEO provide the ability to run the rankings at one shot for over a hundred key phrases and then compare today’s results with results from the past. This is very useful. Mike’s rankings tool does offer limited ‘memory’. It remembers your last 20 key phrases and their rankings. Anything beyond 20 is forgotten. Also, the memory comes from cookies. If you clear your cookies, the history is lost. Despite that, this tool provides the best of the free ones. I usually take snapshots of the results using SnagIT and so I can compare with results from the past.

4. Onlywire.com

Social Media sites are THE in thing these days. Between social networking sites (like myspace.com, http://www.facebook.com, http://www.orkut.com, http://www.linkedin.com) and social bookmarking sites (like http://digg.com, http://del.icio.us, http://stumbleupon.com, etc.) that’s where people hang out. For most niches, you will benefit immensely by participating in these networks and intelligently using them to your advantage. Onlywire.com allows you to submit to 15-20 of these sites at once. That saves you a ton of time and is a really useful handy tool that comes for free. Hats off to them. They have been able to scale as well. The tool has been on for months now and still performs, each and every time.

3. Brad Callen’s Article Submitter and Directory Submitter

Brad Callen is almost a celebrity SEO consultant. He has been around for almost 5 years now. His products are widely used. His paid tool SEO Elite is ranked as one of the best SEO tools around. His free tools, however, Article Submiter and Directory Submitter, make it into my list. Article Submitter allows you to submit your article to hundreds of article directories and directory submitter submits your sites to link directories. These can help you get much needed backlinks to prep up your page rank. However, remember that the overuse of this technique can actually hurt your SEO campaign. Only about 10-20% of your total backlinks should be from Article and lInk directories.

2. Yahoo SIte Explorer

This is a great tool, period. Google is a great company. But one thing I don’t like about them is that they don’ reveal search stats to you as openly as Yahoo does. This site basically shows you the number of backlinks pointing to a specific website. A great way to gauge the progress your link building campaign and to see whether your link building campaign is getting results.

1. Aaron Wall’s Backlink Analyzer Tool

This is my #1 seo tool. This is a brand new tool and it’s totally crazy that it is available for free. It allows you to look at the backlinks pointing to a site, and then look at their anchor text. You can also enter a keyword and get all the top sites for that keyword and then appraoch them for backlinks or link exchanges. A great great tool that you should be using.

At http://www.theClickDepot.com, we use all these tools and several other paid tools to optimize your campaign for you.