If there is one fact that is hard to dispute, it is that blogs are easier to optimize for search result placement. Done effectively, search engine optimization can take a blog to the top of the search results fairly quickly which results in increases in traffic. One argument I hear is that this traffic is going to the blog, not to the website and it is through the website that  sales are made. This can actually be an error in thinking.

Pay attention to your ad quality. Each search engine that uses a quality score will let you know your ad quality is substandard. And it's very important because the higher your ad quality, the lower your keyword bids will be. You'll save money and increase ROI with a higher ad quality, and your ad could rise higher in the line up, ensuring that you get more click throughs. Is that awesome or what?

For websites that incorporate sales and checkout facilities, one option that you may be able to take advantage of is a simple poll. Ask your customers which social media sites they regularly visit. You may even be able to extend your poll to find out how, when and why they use social media. The results may give you an insight as to which social media sites are most popular amongst your customers. This data can be quite valuable for future social marketing campaigns.

Google have announced the long awaited Adsense for Feeds option for those wishing to monetize their RSS feeds. There is however one caveat; existing Feedburner users cannot gain direct access to the ad units. There is a lot of flexibility when it comes to designing your ad. You can have the usual text only, image only or tex/image ad units. You can apply the ad units to every feed, every 2nd, 3rd or 4th feed.

Grok dot com has some good suggestions for improving your lead generation landing pages. In a nutshell: Split your forms into two parts Use more than one lead generation form Don't ask for the lead too early Use PPC effectively Be aggressive in your optimization This is all great advice and I'm particularly intrigued by the last three. While all five of these are great suggestions, Nos. 3 and 5 should be intuitive for anyone using landing pages as lead generation tools.

Social media has become somewhat of a powerhouse when it comes to spreading information faster and further than any other media including television. Whilst television may appear in billions of homes around the world, its impact is generally only for the period of a broadcast. The internet is more permanent allowing individuals to return to the same data as often as they wish. Furthermore, they can interact with others from around the world,

Whilst WordPress may be one of the most popular blog software platforms, Movable Type has beat it to the punch in becoming an extremely versatile blog software tool. Movable type has long been a blogging and CMS tool and the latest release, 4.2, goes one step further and capable of turning any site into a full social publishing platform. The Movable Type blog claims: '.

Your website is a marketing tool. Don't take it lightly. Your copy is the most important aspect of your website. Don't shortcut it. Too many new website owners try to write their copy themselves and pay ooodles of hard-earned money on design. Don't do that. If you are going to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on your website then put the money into great copywriting and save on the design. Your website's design won't make you any money. Your copywriting will.

Do you need a long landing page? It really depends. There are times when a long landing page is beneficial, but generally speaking I'd say a landing page doesn't need to be any longer than it needs to be. In some sectors, a long landing page can be beneficial. Financial analysts, for instance, like lots of figures.

The number of small, one or two person operated online businesses is growing at an astonishing rate. There are several reasons for this growth, one of the most common being costs. With an online business there is little in the way of setup costs and running costs can be kept to a minimum. These small businesses are using social marketing far more successfully than their larger counterparts.

There are time when you may need to insert a table into WordPress, either into a post or into a page. WordPress is not terribly effective when it comes to HTML and where one template will handle the code relatively easily, another template may not. One of the strange things about WordPress is that after very carefully crafting a table you can go straight to publishing. Everything appears to look fine until you find a mistake and need to go back and edit.

OK, PPC Hero beat us to it , but we wanted to talk a little bit about how Google Insights, the latest Google tool, can be used for your PPC campaigns. There are several ways, actually. But just to highlight some of the useful features of Google Insights,

One of the biggest problems with social networking, in fact with any online social activity, is anonymity. In reality, you have no idea who it is you are talking too. This is not a new phenomenon. Since we have been able to communicate online, people have misrepresented themselves. Sometimes it is their gender, or their age, at other times it is their profession, or at least their position.

If you have had a blog for a couple of years chances are that some of those pages are ranking quite well but the content itself is now out of date. You have a number of choices including writing a new post and pointing the old post at it. By far the easiest solution is to simply write over it all with fresh up-to-date content. Don't change the title, don't change the URL - just update the content. Your old content, whilst rating well,

Do you know your peak seasons? You should. And it helps to know when the start and when they end because when it comes to advertising, how much you spend is vitally important. But just as important is how much revenue you bring in the door as a result of that advertising. If your peak season is Christmas, for instance, you know that you can count on a certain amount of business based on the economy and the mood of the marketplace.

We are all human and one of the toughest parts of writing content for your blog is editing your own work. You can read the same mistake a hundred times and miss it. Your eyes are actually playing tricks so read what you think should be there, not what is actually there. If we accept that we are fallible and that we can and do make mistakes, should we go back and correct those mistakes? There are some purists who feel that what has been written should stay, mistakes and all.

StumbleUpon has had a few problems that over the years have become rather frustrating. The first of these was the limit of 200 friends. We got over that - too many to invite to a party anyway. However, half of them may have left, closed their account even; they still remained on your friends list and counted towards that 200 limit. Finally things are changing and it seems they are changing for the better. The 200 friend limit will go, but then, so will your friends.

One often overlooked strategy for using PPC advertising to use it as a lead generation tool. Everyone goes for the close when they might actually make more mileage going for the prospect and waiting till later to make the sales pitch. Here are five principles to incorporate into your next PPC campaign to help you generate more leads that you can use to later close the sale: Write your landing page around capturing an e-mail address: Yes,

If you use MSN adCenter's API then you should take note that you have only four days to upgrade or lose it all. The deadline for upgrading is August 14. The MSN team has a live webcast scheduled for August 19 and will be ready to take your questions. For more information, go to the adCenter blog . Google AdWords was down yesterday for system maintenance so if you tried to login and couldn't - that was the problem. It happens every month. Google Insights has launched.

One of the distractions of social bookmarking is the 'voting' component. Every bookmarking site has some form of voting, whether it is a thumb, a digg or a sphinn, it all the same. What motivates you to vote? If you were to vote every link to sent to you, you would be there all day reading and voting so my next question is, how many of these requests do you actually read? To be honest, I read very few. I read the title that is sent to me, and,