In late September, we launched a beta version of the updated Keyword Tool. This tool is a new, streamlined way for you to identify additional keywords and add them to your account. Previously, we offered two distinct tools to expand your keyword list. The Keyword Tool generated keywords based on the content of the URL, words or phrases you entered into the tool. The Search-based Keyword Tool gave you insight into keywords that you may have been missing out on by identifying actual Google searches that were relevant to your site’s landing pages…

Google announced Monday about upcoming changes to its AdWords API fees. This change has been a long-time waiting for many agencies that have often had a constant battle gaining respect from Google.
The Google API platform is structured to allow developers to interact with AdWords. This permits agencies to create their own bidding and reporting tools. [...]

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First Google rolled out recommendations for “pages similar to” earlier this week, now they also appear to be testing brand recommendations in response to certain queries. As I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable, some users are seeing “brands for” recommendations for searches such as [digital cameras], [cheap laptops], [label printers], [fishing rod] and [...]

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The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization has announced the new slate of officers for the search marketing advocacy and education association. The officers for the coming year are:

Chairman: Jeffrey Pruitt, CEO of Tallwave (re-elected chairman)
President: Chris Boggs, Director, Search Engine Optimization, ROSETTA
Vice president: Dave Fall, SVP Product and Operations, Clickable, Inc.
Treasurer: Margaret Willette, Search Marketing […

Most of you reading this headline will probably think I’m crazy. We all know that search engines do not crawl or index e-mail. What we forget is that you do have the option to view a copy of the e-mail you receive in a browser. Usually this is reserved for e-mails that are sent from [...]

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Yahoo announced a new search index and algorithm update today. The update involves crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms changes over the next few days.
Yahoo said, “you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process, which we expect to complete over the next few days.”
The last Yahoo update [...]

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After the search box, perhaps no other Google product is so synonymous with the company as Maps. Over time Google has come to see its mapping offering — now extended to mobile — and the underlying local data as more and more strategic. To that end, last October in the US Google replaced maps data [...]

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After doing all of your research, you now have a pretty good crop of data to sift through. Remember, during the Research Phase, we collected every keyword we found during our various investigations. Check out this article for a comprehensive recap of Research Phase posts from this column regarding PPC research.
Some of sources [...]

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The situation: Your competitors have inbound links that are broken because of typos, changes in URL structures etc.

The common link building commentary: Most SEOs who’ve been around the link building block will tell you that it’s an opportunity to ‘build links’ for free – to pick low hanging fruit. Just drop the site owner a little email and voila – good as new…

In an effort to help our publishers navigate the array of Google products, we’re happy to announce the first part of our ‘Additional publisher resources’ video series. In these videos we aim to provide an introduction to other Google products that are of interest to AdSense publishers. We’ll cover topics such as how to maximize your site’s visibility to advertisers, how to ensure your site is properly indexed in Google’s search engine, how to make your site more interactive for users and how to gather information on your site’s traffic…

Look at any competitive PPC area today, and you’ll notice many of the ads are selling the same thing.

This is a fundamental problem.

No matter how great you are at PPC, it the product or service you’re selling is flooded with competition, the more your margins will be squeezed. The more your margins are squeezed, the less you will be able to spend on advertising…

Another day, another new and/or improved search tool from Google. Yesterday it was an improved mobile version of Place Pages, and today’s announcement is an upgrade to Google’s mobile image search for iPhones and Android devices.

The changes include showing square thumbnails to maximize the number that appear after a search, swipe-based navigation (like iPhone users [...]

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Last November, I authored a popular post on SEOmoz detailing 15 SEO Problems and the Tools to Solve Them. It focused on a number of free tools and SEOmoz PRO tools. Today, I’m finishing up that project with a stab at another set of thorny issues that continually confound SEOs and how some new (and old) tools can come to the rescue.

Some of these are obvious and well known; others are obscure and brand new…

In the past I’ve spoken about why I turned off blog comments, but it was mostly from a time/labor perspective. Now I have another reason, one that affects everyone from an SEO Perspective. In some cases. leaving comments on will negatively impact your rankings and traffic.In case you missed it, in yesterday’s post I spoke about how Google is being more aggressive in trying to figure out the proper date for a post and displaying it in the SERP’s…

Google has started to combine its Earth and Maps products with the announcement that Earth view is available to all Google Maps users.
To see 3D imagery in Google Maps, you’ll need the Google Earth plugin which anyone can now use; it’s been available to developers since 2008. There’s also a new “Earth” tab on [...]

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

Google “Augmenting” Street View With Local Biz Information
Google started playing with “augmented reality” — I’m using the term here loosely — in the PC version of Street View several months ago, but now [...]

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Google started playing with “augmented reality” — I’m using the term here loosely — in the PC version of Street View several months ago, but now appears to be rolling it out more extensively.
Local business listings now appear as small icons connected to their buildings in the Street View image.
Clicking on one brings up an [...]

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Google noted that they added a new search option for TV show related queries that let you filter by show episode.
For example, here is a search query with the search options showing video and episodes:

This is a pretty neat filter to have, especially when you are trying to find that show you remembered, but didn’t [...]

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Google’s longstanding Google Advertising Professionals program is going away, to be replaced with a new Google Adwords Certification program, Google has announced. The change means those certified through GAP will have six months to recertify under the new program. The change may also allow more companies to gain certification, as the overall required spend level [...]

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For the second time in the past few months Google has been punished by a court outside the US for content posted by users on one of its owned and operated sites. In February an Italian court imposed a criminal privacy conviction on Google executives for the appearance of a video, showing the bullying of [...]

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Google’s obsession with usability is well-established. They use human evaluators to test search results and many algorithmic methods to establish quality scores that can impact rankings, such as the recently introduced site speed value. There are a number of common usability elements of business websites which I believe could be leveraged for rankings in local [...]

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There are times when you want to expand your keywords but you have run out of ideas and places to look. In this post I will examine some alternate tools to help you come up with new keywords.
Always remember, just because a tool suggested a keyword does not mean you should use it. Consider the [...]

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(Cross-posted on the Inside AdWords and the Agency Ad Solutions blogs)As the advertising industry has grown and evolved, so too has our relationship with advertising agencies. These companies, from SEMs to the largest traditional agencies, play a critical role in the continued success of Google, our advertisers and our industry — so we spend a lot of time talking to agencies about how we can make it easier for them to work with us and our advertisers…

Online marketing is complex, and it seems that the number of factors you need to consider to make sure you have the optimal strategy is only increasing. Therefore, it might be tempting to conclude that SEO, or more broadly, online marketing, is something that needs to be outsourced. There is certainly a strong [...]

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Many brands find themselves with a siloed online strategy for managing their content, social communities and ecommerce. This problem was not planned, but inherited by the natural evolution of their online presence.

In the early days of the Web (circa 2000), most brands started with a simple, content-based website to promote their products and solutions. After the dot com boom, many brands added the ability to buy their products online, and more recently, have added a variety of social communities…

There are a variety of tools and techniques recommended for SEO keyword research, from the free to the expensive, from the well-known to those that are almost kept a secret. However, there’s one source of keyword ideas which is often overlooked: the customers (and potential customers) served on a daily basis.

Let’s get sidetracked for a moment: I’ve lost track of the number of people at agencies who have been asked the question "If you’re so good at SEO, why don’t you rank for ‘SEO in New York’?" (Or wherever the agency is based…

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

TweetUp Scores Its Own Search Column In TweetDeck
TweetUp, the new AdWords-like ad platform for Twitter has added a prime, new publishing partner: the popular Twitter client, TweetDeck.
In an email to early TweetUp members, [...]

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TweetUp, the new AdWords-like ad platform for Twitter has added a prime, new publishing partner: the popular Twitter client, TweetDeck.
In an email to early TweetUp members, founder Bill Gross explains how TweetUp’s sponsored listings will be integrated in TweetDeck:
TweetDeck will feature a separate search column for TweetUp results, where users can see continually updated results [...]

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Real-time/Twitter search engine CrowdEye says it has “totally rebuilt” its site and is now using Twitter’s “Firehose” data feed. The site offers a handful of new features, most of which are available in the left-column of a CrowdEye search results page.

The new options include:

Filtering between tweets or links
A 14-day archive of tweets and the ability [...]

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Saturday, April 24th is the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Telescope by NASA. The launch date was exactly on April 24, 1990 at 8:33:51 am EDT. Google Australia already has a special logo up for the day. This logo, like the Olympics logo spans across the width of [...]

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