Re-Building My Firefox Sidebar (and Ranking the SEO Blogs)

In November of last year, I updated my Firefox Sidebar to contain all the sites and tools on the web I regularly need. Today, I’ve done that again and, in the process, re-compiled and re-ordered my list of search-related blogs according to my personal preferences. Since I’m heading out of town for 2 weeks starting Tuesday (getting married, then a short vacation), this should give anyone who’s in need of more to read a solid solution.

Download Rand’s Firefox Sidebar

Let’s start with the SEO/M Blogs. Remember that the ordering is based on my personal preference of where I visit most often and get the most value. Unless you’re exactly like me, you’ll probably have your own opinions about what to put where:

1. SearchEngineLand
2. SEO Book
3. Search Engine Journal
4. Search Engine Roundtable
5. Small Business SEM
6. Gray Wolf
7. DaveN
8. Marketing Pilgrim
9. Matt Cutts
10. Greg Linden
11. SEO By the Sea
12. Webmaster Central Blog
13. MindValley Labs
14. Grokdotcom
15. Stephan Spencer’s Scatterings
16. Eric Enge
17. Vanessa Fox
18. Distilled’s Online Reputation Management Blog
19. Jon Mendez
20. SugarRae
21. On Startups (Dharmesh Shah)
22. Seth Godin
23. Traffick
24. Shoemoney
25. Ian Lurie
26. Fred Wilson (A VC)
27. SEO Theory
28. Joost De Valk
29. SEO Scoop
30. SEO Black Hat
31. John Mueller
32. Resource Shelf
33. Dennis Mortensen
34. Avinash Kaushik
35. Bill Hartzer
36. CornwallSEO
37. Palatnik Factor
38. Blue Hat SEO
39. Techipedia
40. Yahoo! Search Blog
41. MSN Search Blog
42. Guy Kawasaki’s Blog
43. Performancing

“Social Buzz” is a critical category for me. Since so much of SEO work revolves around social media, linkbait and trend-watching, I try to keep abreast of as much as I can in the world of viral content. It’s tremendously valuable to see not only what sorts of viral content techniques are working, but also to stay abreast of the tech/online world’s general interest levels around given topics.

1. Techmeme
2. Reddit
3. Del.icio.us/Popular
4. Hacker News
5. Sphinn
6. Yahoo! Buzz
7. Digg
8. PopURLs

Bookmarklets – I honestly don’t know how I’d survive without them. The SEOmoz bookmarklet to plug in any URL to the PRO tools dashboard and run any type of report I want is a great one, but the basics like Yahoo! link checking and the Google site command are equally useful. You can take the links below and drag/drop them into your sidebar to use.

Reputation monitoring and link growth tracking is essential to our business. I’m constantly monitoring any trackable mention I can find of the SEOmoz brand to help inform our strategy, figure out where we’re going right and wrong, and watch to see how our content performs from a link growth perspective.

In my SEO Tools folder, I’ve got links to the sources I use most frequently. These don’t include a lot of SEOmoz’s own tools, because it’s so much faster to use the SEOmoz Tool Dashboard bookmarklet (above). Our newest tool – Trifecta – isn’t in that system yet, so I’ve got it here.

Web Resources could easily be grouped in with SEO Tools, but I like to separate the two simply because they serve somewhat different functions.  The web resources include some automated analysis tools, but they also have web services like Wufoo and ObjectGraph, which I find valuable.

I’m not active in a ton of different social sites, but I’m trying to get a bit better about logging in and contributing more than once every few months. Right now, I’m just using:

I admit that in recent months, my forum activity has fallen off even more dramatically than in years past. I grew up in the SEO forums, first as a spectator (starting in 2002) to an active member (in 03-04) and finally as a moderator at several forums. However, my role at SEOmoz took away the time I once had to devote to those arenas and I now find that I only perform a few activities at forums, such as looking for blog post ideas and answering the occasional question about SEOmoz.

News is where I go during lunch. Typically, I run outside, grab something from a nearby restaurant and eat in front of my computer, where I browse the latest in science news, the tech field, politics, and more. Once again, these are in order of how much I read/value them:

1. Slate Magazine
2. Polymeme
3. BBC News
4. Electoral Vote
5. The Stranger
6. Newsvine
7. International Herald Tribune
8. National Geographic News
9. NY Times Technology Section
10. Wired News

I’d love to hear from everyone out there if there are sites or resources I should really be reading/using or that you find terrifically valuable outside of the ones I’ve detailed above.