PPC used to pretty simple.

You just signed up, selected a keyword terms – probably used your SEO keyword list – put in a few bids, and hit go. Some tweaking here, some tweaking there. Life was good.

These days, with quality scores, ruthless levels of competition (including Google competing against the advertisers), a wealth of segmentation options, and complex analysis and reporting, PPC has become more demanding, necessitating the need for more in depth training…

There’s no such thing as a free link. Whether it was the time taken to craft that blog post, the cash used to film that viral video, or even just the opportunity cost of thinking about how to build links, there is an investment involved. For my first post here at SEOmoz, I want to talk about how a small business might approach the investment into link building.

To make this post a little less hypothetical, we’re going to set a budget of $2,000 and/or 60 hours…

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 Engine Market Share Steady In July: Hitwise

  There’s little change in the latest search engine market share numbers from Experian Hitwise. The company announced its stats for July 2010 today, and there’s almost no change at all for Google, Yahoo, and Bing…

A Get Elastic reader emailed me a question about paid search advertising: How do you maintain a keyword list when the SKU count is large and the product turnover is high? Think of all the money a large advertiser wastes sending traffic to out-of-stock product pages!

To answer this question, I commissioned my friend George Michie from the Rimm-Kaufman Group (RKG), one of the most respected paid search agencies in the SEM world, working with many advertisers of this size…

For the past few years, I’ve given numerous presentations introducing SEO to new audiences of marketers, engineers and executives. With the end of SEOmoz’s consulting business this past January and the completion of our final contract obligations this Spring, I thought it would be wise to share the 190+ page deck to hopefully help those of you who are tasked with introducing SEO to your companies, agencies and colleagues…

Sigh, not this again.

Recently Rand highlighted his surprise at how prevalent search spam is. But the big issue with search today is not the existence of spam, but how it is dealt with. For a long period of time Google spent much of their resources fighting spam manually. That worked when spammers were sorta poor and one hit wonders fighting on the edge of the web & few people knew how search worked…

While search technology naturally evolves, we must also recognize that human’s usage, expectations & desires for search are evolving as well. As marketers learn to leverage the information, tools & channels available now, we need to be cognizant and welcoming of the evolving search trends on tomorrow’s horizon. Who should be playing catchup, search technology or the human brain?

Search Engine Strategies San Francisco invited three bleeding-edge thought leaders to examine the question, Search: Where to Next? The attentive SESSF audience were treated to a mix of  marketer’s, toolmaker’s, user’s & search engine’s perspective on the shape of search to come…

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

From Search Engine Land:

• Hunch: Traffic Down, Registrations Way Up & We’re Smarter

  Even though its traffic is down, Hunch says new user registrations have risen dramatically recently. And as more users register, Hunch says its recommendation engine keeps getting smarter…

DoubleClick Ad Planner helps you research and identify the web sites most likely to attract your audience. With Ad Planner, you can select sites, add them to your media plan and easily export them directly into your AdWords account as a new campaign, or add them to an existing campaign or ad group.
Many of you requested this feature because you wanted an easy way to plan and buy Google Display Network (GDN) campaigns using Ad Planner…

Unless you’re lucky enough to be selling something absolutely unique, you’ll face competition in PPC. How you position against your competitors is crucial to your success.

Positioning is not simply a case of writing better ads, bidding higher, or occupying the top space. Positioning starts before you get anywhere near a PPC campaign.

It starts with research.

What Are Your Competitors Offering?

First, you need to get a sense of the market…

For a long time, if you asked me about spamming the search engines, whether with hardcore black hat tactics or merely gray hat link acquisition, I’d say that in the long run, neither was the right move. Building a great site and a great brand through hard work, white hat links, solid content and marketing strategies has always been my path of choice. It still is today, but my faith is definitely wavering…

The saying goes “A rising tide lifts all boats” – the idea that improvements in the general economy will benefit all participants in that economy (Wikipedia) and attribute the saying to John F Kennedy.

With a free business model reliant on goodwill, community and the viral dissemination of free content, paid for by SEO & Viral traffic seeing advertising, it is a pretty viable concept…

We’ve just added a new course to the AdWords Online Classroom all about mobile advertising and how you can start using it to reach more customers.
Did you know that there are now 4 billion mobile phone owners globally? Half of all new internet connections come from mobile devices, and by 2014 it’s reported that there will be more mobile internet users than desktop internet users.* We offer a number of innovative ad formats to help you reach mobile users looking for products and services…

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

From Search Engine Land:

• Q&A: comScore’s New “Core Search” & “Explicit Core Search” Figures

  Today, comScore is releasing an additional set of search market share metrics designed to better reflect “core” search activity, something that’s become an issue as companies such as Yahoo and Microsoft have inflated traditional metrics through the use of “slideshows” and other “contextual search” activities…

Last week I was given the opportunity to attend the Boston AdSense In Your City event. Though Boston technically isn’t my city (I’m a New Yorker by birth) I can see why so many of our fabulous publishers call it home.Despite our varied interests (ranging from hot sauce to sheepdogs, ab workouts to online video games), every single person in that room was connected by their intense passion for their site’s subject, experience with AdSense, and desire to learn more…

Guido Daniele was born in Soverato (Italy) and now lives and works in Milan. He graduated from Brera School of Arts (major in sculpturing) and he has been painting and participating in personal and group art exhibitions since 1968. In 1990 he added a new artistic experience to his previous ones: using the body painting technique he creates and paints models bodies for different situations such as advertising pictures and commercials, fashion events and exhibitions…

In our most recent webinar Taking Your Site Performance to The Next Level With Optimization Testing, an audience member asked a great question about site testing near a product launch. A perfect industry example is packaged software. A software product may release a new version every year or two. For the first few months after release, marketing runs a number of campaigns, traffic volume spikes and sales go through the roof…

Following on from my debut SEOmoz blog post on How to Get Links in Tough Industries, I wanted to go into a bit more detail about the processes you can use to find people who are likely to link to you.  Using the right processes to identify the leaders in your industry can give you a much better return on your time spent link building.  This is for two reasons -

1. You are finding people with a genuine interest in your industry who are more likely to reply to you
2. You are finding people who are influential which can lead to more links from their audience

We all know that link building is hard, it takes time, patience and an uncanny ability to handle rejection…

People sharing Twitter passwords with rogue friend apps has been a problem for a few years – I have written quite a few posts warning people of the dangers of sharing passwords with insecure apps, and have also been critical of giant social networks continuing the practice of scraping data from other services using standard password authentication.

Thus I am glad to see Twitter will switch off access to their API using standard authentication of username and password, and providing access only by OAuth…

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

From Search Engine Land:

• Oracle Sued Google Over Patent Infringement Of Java Within Android

  Oracle has filed suit against Google for allegedly infringing on patents they hold for Java, which Oracle acquired last year.
  Karen Tillman from Oracle said, “In developing Android, Google knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle’s Java-related intellectual property…

This is part of a series of stories from people who have shared how Google has helped them in their lives. If you missed the rest of the stories this week, check them out—and if you have a Google story, tell us about it. -Ed.Of all the great stories people send us, some simply make us laugh and appreciate even more why we’re in the search business. For our final post in our series of your Google stories, we’re sharing three tales that we found particularly funny and unique…

Accepting that the beginning of the end of summer is on the horizon can be a drag. It’s times like these we must do everything within our power to totally rock the house… and what better way than with techies, tequila and tapas?

Next week, online marketers from around the world are expected to flock to *crosses fingers* sunny San Francisco to attend Search Engine Strategies…

In the last three weeks, we showed you tools to effectively plan your display advertising campaigns, develop compelling ads, and target your ads to reach precisely the right audience across millions of both popular and niche sites in the Google Display Network (GDN). In today’s final post, we’ll dive into measuring and improving your online display campaigns with powerful, free tools that bring accountability to your display advertising investment…

Update: Thank you everyone for your patience with the video issues. It looks like our video host’s CDN accidentally cached a bad request. Everything should be working now! Party on!

 In this week’s Whiteboard Friday I talk about pitching SEO to potential clients and employers. This post describes the common elements that unite the successful pitches I have witnessed and describes how you can use them to your advantage…

Update: Thank you everyone for your patience with the video issues. It looks like our video host’s CDN accidentally cached a bad request. Everything should be working now! Party on!

 In this week’s Whiteboard Friday I talk about pitching SEO to potential clients and employers. This post describes the common elements that unite the successful pitches I have witnessed and describes how you can use them to your advantage…

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

From Search Engine Land:

• Gnarly, Dude: Google Solves Rubik’s Cube In 20 Moves

  This’ll make a lot of us feel a lot dumber: Scientists have used Google to prove that Rubik’s Cube can be solved in 20 moves or less. So, that was about two years of my early 1980s life wasted…

This is part of a series of stories from people who have shared how Google has helped them in their lives. Check back tomorrow for the last post, and if you have a Google story, tell us about it. -Ed.Like most search quality engineers at Google, the projects I work on revolve around helping people find information. The vast amount of content on the web makes this a daunting task—sometimes it feels like searching for a needle in a field full of haystacks…

(cross-posted from the Google Mobile Blog)Our mobile phones have become modern-day Swiss Army knives. An Android phone is a handheld computer, a music player, a notepad, a GPS navigation unit and more, all rolled into one sleek device that fits in your pocket. Today’s phones do so many things for us that sometimes we don’t even think about how we do them.Even though our phones do all these new things, the most natural way of interacting with a phone remains what it always has been: speaking…

We wanted to give you all a heads up about a new Google blog that is focused on helping small businesses grow. Check out their first post below and visit googlesmb.blogspot.com to follow their future posts and updates. -ed. Most every business, including ours, starts small. These days, technology is giving businesses even more ways to grow bigger… faster.In our recent Small Business series on the Official Google Blog, a handful of real-life entrepreneurs have shared their experiences building companies from scratch and embracing Internet tools that have taken their businesses to the next level…

I wish I didn’t feel compelled to write this, as this is one project I was really looking forward to using.

I applied for the beta a while back but didn’t make the cut… obviously they thought they had enough affiliates testing it.

Those affiliates obviously have no idea about business security.

They are asking for and storing Google Account passwords…

That is a high risk

It may also mean that users would give their Gmail account access, which might have other personal data such as hosting and domain registration information…