The newest addition to the Google scholarships family is the Google Student Veterans of America (SVA) Scholarship. We’re partnering with the nonprofit Student Veterans of America (SVA) to support their mission of providing veterans with the resources, support and advocacy they need to succeed in higher education and throughout their careers. The Google SVA Scholarship is available to student veterans who are pursuing degrees in computer science and related fields in the U…

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Managing PPC Through The Fog Of Long Tail Keywords

  PPC managers over the years have always struggled with the right number of keywords to have in their accounts. Should you build out a big inventory of long tail keywords, or keep your campaigns neat and tidy, with fewer terms that account for most of the volume? Honestly, I’d say that most accounts I’ve seen, and indeed, many […

Yesterday Joe Hall became annoyed. Otherwise soft spoken outspoken Joe had some choice words for an SEO company which had come up with what can be described as a creative way to get +1's:

The site's pages contained an inline popup layover thingie. You know, the page gets dimmed, the inline popup appears and then you have to click somewhere?

No biggie – popups work, after all – but this popup was different…

Placing additional ad units on your site can have a big impact on your earnings. However, sometimes publishers find it difficult to decide whether an additional ad unit makes sense for their site. We’ve created a short video below to help you make sure you’re following best practices, as outlined on Google’s webmaster guidelines, when placing new ad units on your site.

Ultimately, great content is what will help your site stand out and engage your users…

I've deliberately put myself in some hot water to demonstrate how I would do a technical SEO site audit in 1 hour to look for quick fixes, (and I've actually timed myself just to make it harder). For the pros out there, here's a look into a fellow SEO 's workflow; for the aspiring, here's a base set of checks you can do quickly.

I've got some lovely volunteers who have kindly allowed me to audit their sites to show you what can be done in as little as 60 minutes…

Google’s Take on Search Plus Your World

A few weeks ago Google announced the launch of Search Plus Your World, which deeply integrates social sites (especially Google+) into the Google search experience to make it more personalized.

While Google claimed that the socialization was rather broad-based, the lack of inclusion of Facebook & Twitter along with the excessive promotion of Google+ raised eyebrows…

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Analyzing keyword performance, discovering new keyword opportunities, and determining which keywords to focus efforts on can be painstaking when you have thousands of keywords to review…

In a recent statement Larry Page said if you don’t get SPYW then maybe you shouldn’t work at Google. To understand why he thinks this is such a good idea–and why the rest of the world thinks it isn’t–we need to revisit the concept of filter bubbles and why they are such a bad idea.

Last year Eli Pariser released the book the Filter Bubble (see my review of the the Filter Bubble)…

You can learn a lot more about what Google really thinks by reading what their new hires say. They are not yet skilled in the arts of public relations & make major gaffs like this one:

Instead of being able to SEO the entire Internet, businesses can now only affect the search results for a tiny percentage of users. That’s a good thing because SEO can’t scale, and SEO isn’t good for users or the Internet at large…

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Microsoft adCenter Increases Ad Description, Adds Budget Widget & More Mobile Targeting Options

  Microsoft announced their January 2012 adCenter release update. The update includes three major additions to adCenter: (1) adCenter increased the ad description length by one additional character from 70 to 71…

Women make up more than half the global population, but hold fewer than a third of the world’s engineering jobs. In the U.S., female students comprise fewer than 15 percent of all Advanced Placement computer science test takers. Even in high-tech Israel, few girls choose computer science. Not only is this a loss to companies like Google and everyone who benefits from a continually developing web; it’s also a lost opportunity for girls…

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

The 80/20 Value of Titles

Recently, Rand did one of the best Whiteboard Fridays I've seen in a while (I do watch all of them) about increasing the likelihood of your content going viral…

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• French Court Fines Google $660,000 Because Google Maps Is Free

  Google faces a $660,000 fine after a French court ruling that the company is abusing its dominant position in mapping by making Google Maps free. According to The Economic Times, the French commercial court “upheld an unfair competition complaint lodged by Bottin Cartographes against Google France and its parent company Google Inc…

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

In the world of link building, getting an authority link to your site/blog has been one of the most important aspects of growing your blog. Back in 2009 Page Level Link Metrics and Domain Level Authority Features accounted for over 46% of your pages own authority:

In 2011, that percentage has dropped, but only by 4% [42…

So your AdWords program is humming, Bing is kicking out a smattering of leads and you’re running Facebook ads. Good stuff.

Have you tested LinkedIn Ads yet?

Like AdWords, Bing or Facebook, LinkedIn advertising has its idiosyncrasies. It’s quite different from SEM or display buying. It’s a unique ad buying and ad management experience that deserves a handbook of its own. In this post, I’ll lay down the basics, explain how it works, and share with you some tricks and best practices to get the most from your LinkedIn CPC investment…

While thousands of lucky fans will brave the crowds at the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Ind. to fill the coveted seats at this Sunday’s Super Bowl, many more in the U.S. will enjoy the game from home—in front of the TV, with mobile phones and tablets at the ready.

As the New York Giants and New England Patriots prepare for kickoff, here are several ways to make the most of the big game with Google—wherever you’re watching…

We’re glad to announce that Indonesian has just joined the family of AdSense supported languages. Let’s celebrate by raising our hands in a kecak dance, watching a wayang kulit show or cooking traditional Indonesian recipes.If you have a website in Bahasa Indonesia, you’ll now be able to earn money by showing Google AdSense ads. To get started, sign up for an AdSense account. We’ll review your application and in the meantime, we recommend you get familiar with the basics of AdSense and our policies…

In December, we rolled out branded keyword rules and metrics to campaigns to help you segment your branded traffic. Now, we’re excited to introduce a companion feature to make your keyword research easier: Find New Keywords. With this feature, you can view keywords sending you organic search traffic, filter on your brand rules, and determine if you want to track them in your campaign.

First, the basics…

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Matt Cutts Convinces Some South Korean Govt. Websites To Stop Blocking Googlebot

  Matt Cutts, international diplomat? That might be the more appropriate title for Google’s chief spam cop. According to the Wall Street Journal, Cutts is in South Korea this week and, in a presentation Monday night for about 80 government officials, webmasters, lawyers and journalists, managed to singlehandedly convince some government reps to let Googlebot crawl […

There was a time in the not-too-distant past when advertisers could operate search engine marketing campaigns using misleading or false claims. You could promise “24/7 customer service,” “amazing views,” “customer recommended” or whatever you could think of to sell a product, and there were few ways for consumers to truly vet your claims – until it was too late!

Those days are ending, if they aren’t already completely over…

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Yandex Joins Bing, Yahoo In Using Nokia-Navteq Map Data

  Russian search giant Yandex announced that it will be licensing data from Nokia-owned Navteq to offer better and more comprehensive maps coverage around the world: Yandex . . . has purchased a license for digital maps supplied by the leading global location content provider, NAVTEQ…

Starting today, we will begin rolling out updates to your Impression Share metrics, which include new ad group-level impression share metrics as well as revised campaign-level impression share metrics.  We’ve also changed the frequency with which we update this data to once a day. These updates will be in effect in all accounts globally over the next few days.

For more information on Impression Share, please visit the AdWords Help Center…

Since introducing Dynamic Search Ads in beta in October, we’ve seen questions from around the web asking about real-world performance and recommendations for implementation. Today we’re grateful to share the perspectives of Matt Mierzewski and Jen Syverud at RKG, an online marketing services firm with B2B and B2C clients ranging from startups to the Fortune 500 (details about RKG below).Here’s a short video followed by Q&A…

Our business at Google is rooted in STEM and CS, so we’re passionate about supporting organizations that are expanding access to these fields, especially for students who might not have the opportunity otherwise. The annual Google Roots in Science and Engineering (RISE) program supports organizations running innovative STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and CS (computer science) enrichment programs for K-12 and university students around the world…

When it comes to sharing links through Twitter, what makes them click?

Dan Zarella from HubSpot set out to answer that question, analyzing over 200,000 link-containing tweets, and measuring several characteristics that appear to influence click through. Dan’s findings are presented infographically (WordPress tells me this is not a word, but I don’t care), which we will here break down tip-by-tip, along with some real-world examples…

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

One of my favourite SEO anecdotes goes like this: two men are walking through an African game reserve when they come across a lion, one of the men calmly puts down his backpack and slips on the running shoes he has been carrying…

The ‘over optimization’ of anchor text has been coming up a lot recently in conversations that I have been having and has been the subject of a few recent blog posts. For the sake of this post and to quell any arguments stemming from the phrase ‘over optimization’, I am, for this post, defining the term as: building too many links with targeted anchor text such that they a) no longer provides value or b) actually takes away value – basically you’ve built too many targeted links and you’re not seeing your rankings increase…

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

For a long time I’ve been pulling an RSS feed from Twitter for the query: “guest post” OR “guest author” [TOPIC] into my Google Reader…

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Search In Pics: David Beckham At Google, Google’s Moscow Office & Bing Bar

  In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more…

Kicking off our new weekly feature Infographic Friday are our friends at Invesp Consulting, who have compiled some interesting stats and trends on social networking from around the globe.

Why does this matter to ecommerce?

We have become a social networking culture, and this behavior is permeating every area of our lives. Even solo activities like using search engines is becoming socialized, as is shopping, travel, education and even work…