Part of being an SEO professional is keeping up to date with major search engine updates. To keep things simple I’m just going to talk about tracking Google’s algorithm updates. Of course one of the best places to start is the official Google blog. Subscribe to the feed using an RSS reader like Google Reader. I attempt to read through my RSS feeds everyday, prioritizing each feed into specific categories. The official search engine blog sites are the first ones I read everyday then I work my way down my list; advanced SEO blogs, basic SEO news, social media news, webmaster news, etc. This way I get the most important updates (algorithm changes) first.

Follow Respected SEO Professionals

Now that we’re getting updates from Google themselves, we’ll soon find out we can’t rely on them to tell us every little change. At this point you’ll need to learn to also get RSS updates from respected SEO resources like;

• http://mattcuts.com/blog
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog
• http://www.wolf-howl.com

These and other blogs do your homework for you and provide case studies of their results. Reading these blogs will be the third best way to track Google changes using RSS feeds. You’re probably now asking yourself “what was the second best way?” The second best way is to do your own experiments, track your own results and analyze your own experience.

Bookmark The Important Updates

The final step of the process is having a place you can go to to review the most recent Google Updates or even look to the past to reference an older update. This process is something new that I just started doing this month but has already become very valuable to me when working with clients and explaining changes that may effect them. I have been using my favorite bookmarking delicious.com to bookmark the updates that are important. Please feel free to subscribe to this feed for yourself.

Use Collaboration to Make a Larger List

One other suggestion is to work with others to have a shared list of updates. This way you have a greater chance of catching all major algorithm updates. Maybe put one person in charge of tracking Google, another person tracking Bing and a third tracking Yahoo (even though they’ll become Bing soon) and Ask.

Good luck!