The most important tool used by search engine optimizers is their brains. There is a tremendous amount of requisite knowledge and ongoing education involved in being a good SEO. Finding and absorbing that amount of information takes years. A typical SEO needs to have a better than working proficiency in areas ranging from web design and hosting to writing and marketing.

A strong vocabulary and extraordinary keyword research skills are important compliments to truly awesome technical abilities. Finding the balance between both is sort of a left brain vs. right brain challenge. The working life of a good SEO is one dedicated to constant and consistent learning, a task made more important by constant and consistent changes in the nature of the search marketing environment.

There is a massive general knowledge base SEOs pull from, a very public library of sorts. The problem is, that library scattered across the Internet in thousands of unique places. Though dozens have tried over the years, nobody has managed to properly sort it yet. There is no mega-repository of SEO secrets, knowledge, tips, tricks or common sense. There are however, several excellent starting points for exploration and tutorial.

The search marketing industry is large and dynamic enough to demand several daily sources of information. The largest daily news publications are: marketing pilgrim, se roundtable, search engine land, search engine watch, search engine journal, sitepronews, webpronews. Each of these publications are updated daily and each has archives of all previous articles that can, in some cases, reach five years or deeper.

Knowledge sharing has always been an important part of the SEO industry. Practically every independent SEO firm runs its own blog. There are hundreds of high quality blogs in the search and social marketing community, far too many to mention. Those hundreds of search marketing blogs are updated daily or several times each week. It doesn’t take long to find specific blogs that meet one’s interests or that feature voices one wants to read regularly. There are also dozens of well known weekly and monthly newsletters published by prominent SEO and webmaster news organizations. Again, these are far too numerous to mention. A note of caution here however. Be sure to only give your email address (necessary to receive an email newsletter) to an organization that guarantees not to share your information with others or you might end up receiving a sudden uptick in spam.

The liveliest place to find fresh information and continuous dissertation and dissection is in the six or seven major search marketing discussion forums, many of which have existed for as long as the SEO industry has. There is a lot of crossover between forums and voices found in one can often be found in others. Some of the most well known formus are: search engine watch, high rankings forums, cre8asite forums, and webmasterworld forums.

Lastly the place SEOs dig for information is in patent applications filed by the major search engines. The industry expert in patent reading is Bill Slawski. Published in Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch and at Cre8asite, Bill is usually the first to read and interpret information found in patent applications.