What is the best resource for information about Search engine
marketing / optimization? I am looking to buy a book or other resource
material but it seems that there is a lot of crappy stuff on the
market. I have tried forums etc but it takes a lot of time, and its
difficult too, to filter all the information. Besides that a lot of the
advise is contradictionary. Where can I buy a good guide or find
antoher good informational resource which has proven itself?? Thanks
for your help..

Just a comment. As search engines develope and adjust to the "tricks"
of webmasters, the optimization techinques will continue to adjust to
fool the improved search engines. Your real issue it that learning
will take LOTS of time because you must always keep up to date on the
new tricks. Most books become outdated and normally give the wrong
type of information to begin with. Anyone remember the days of link
farms and how they were THE thing? Now you actually are hurt by using
them. From day one the best optimization tactic has been to design and
develope a site with relevent keywords, clear and persistant content,
with easy navigation fresh and regularly updated content, and
origional material. Remember that each search engine has its own
guidlines for ranking...
://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html is google's
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/ranking/ranking-02.html and
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-18.html are for
yahoo. http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_GuidelinesforOptimizingSite.htm
for the new msn beta search.  These are actual recommendations from
the search engines. Follow each Search engines guidlines and you
should do well- although it is likely to be a slower process than if
you learn the "tricks" of SEO

Now if you want to learn the "tricks" currently being used in SEO-
look to spent a few hours a day investigating newsletters such as
http://www.sitepronews.com/, http://www.webpronews.com/
http://www.seo-news.com/. There are many out there and although you
may have to learn to weed out the good/bad advice, they are worth
reading. Its best to start with a high content, user friendly site
that focuses on one topic and then promote it as recommended by the
actual search engines. Taking into account that each engine does have
its own ranking system be prepared to do better/worse in one over the
other. If you find you MUST use trickery, take caution as search
engines penalize if you are caught using it. And although it may work
in the short term almost every engine has been known to DROP sites
using it.

<B>What is the best resource for information about Search engine
marketing / optimization? I am looking to buy a book or other resource
material but it seems that there is a lot of crappy stuff on the
market.</B>

The books and other resources cant help you on the topic you are
looking to be a part of. The best thing that can help you on Search
Engine Optimization are the forums, blogs and articles that are
published on regular basis on internet. Yes the forums has the biggest
disadvantage that it consumes lots of time but then the recent
information on it is worth wasting. You but a book today and next day
you can find that it almost obsolete.

Hi All, and thanks for your answers.
Since forums seem to be the best bet, which forums should I be looking
at? Do Can you recommend any? thanks in advance..

I understand you are looking for search engine optimization (seo)
information. While seo is a necessary component of your marketing
plan, it can take months for your website to be spidered by the
searche engines. And even then, there is no real guarantee that you
page will be ranked within the engines in a rank that will ever get
your page seen.
I would suggest you also implement some pay per click ppc components
to your campaign. There are some good ones listed here:
http://www.northpolemedia.com/pay-per-click.html.
Plus, Google Adwords provide excellent traffic, if used correctly. If
you want to try this route, I would strongly suggest that you do some
research before beginning a campaign. Perry Marshall offers an
excellent course on adwords, and can be found here:
http://perrymarshall.com/cmd.php?pg=192967
And a final suggestion, whether you decide to go by seo or ppc or
preferably both, a must have tool is Wordtracker.
http://our.affiliatetracking.net/wordtracker/a/12617
This tool will let do you find out exactly how many times a word has
been searched for on the search engines. The real value of this
program is that you can often find keywords that are not as common but
still provide good traffic. Chances are good that not as many
webmasters will be optimizing their pages for these words, allowing
you a better chance to get ranked higher in the results.

I spend my life doing SEO for about 100 websites.  The truth of the
matter is that there is no one source or comprehensive guide that you
need for SEO. All of the above posts are good.

http://www.webmasterworld.com is the best place to stay abreast of SEO news
http://pixelfast.com/overture to find out how valuable your search terms are
http://www.wordtracker.com to find for keyword research


The rest of it is hard work.

If you want an overview: http://www.se-news.com this isn't a bad place
to start. But you can get everything you need to know for free on the
Internet.  I Would set aside 1 week to just read about SEO before you
start doing anything.

Getting your head around blogging is pretty important as well. If you
have the money www.how2blog.com might be worth a read.

Try:

http://www.getpromoted.com

It is a great resource for webmasters. This forum is dedicated to
Search Engine Optimization only.