by Mike Fleming If you manage a PPC account, you know that for several years now AdWords has had three match types: exact, phrase, and broad. You also know what they mean and how your keywords are matched to search queries. Up until a couple of years ago, broad match meant that the keywords in your phrase were matched to queries that had all of your words in any order . Then,

by Sage Lewis This is a question I get asked all the time. Get the final answer right here. Inspired from this article at Search Engine Roundtable Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Mike Moran Some of you might know that I like to take Augusts off. While not completely off the grid )I still clean out my e-mailalthough I don't reply muchand I still moderate comments on my blog(, I don't write any blog posts )on my blog or here at Search Engine Guide(, and I stay off Twitter. I also don't read any blog posts or check out what others are saying on Twitterit's a social media fast. Each year, it's interesting to find myself picking up a newspaper again.

by Stoney deGeyter Much like life, websites have to adapt over time. When they don't, they risk becoming stagnant, outdated, stale, and boring. As times change, so should your content. Content that was once relevant becomes irrelevant or in need of an update, old products get dumped in favor of new products, and data becomes outdated and needs to be replaced. There are any number of reasons why content needs to be changed, freshened up, or removed altogether. But rarely,

by Eric Brown Several camps are starting to chant that 2011 may well be the year of The Social Media Bubble . I would not proclaim to be able to predict the future be any means, but it sure seems more probable than not. While having little experience predicting the future, we have had an up close and personal relationship with the real estate bubble. Developing real estate used to be a pretty fun endeavor,

by Mike Fleming If you take your PPC campaigns seriously )why wouldn't you?(, you're always testing . Always. It's the only way to accomplish long-term growth and gain insights that will translate into all of your other marketing channels. One problem that has been inherent since the beginning of PPC is the inability to do true A/B split-testing with variables like keywords, bids, ad text, ad groups, match types, dynamic keyword insertion, etc. Yes, you could test them,

by Stoney deGeyter When it comes to getting your visitors to take action, whether that be a sale, download, request, or call, it's your content that is going to either make it happen or leave people blowing in the wind like a sagebrush through a ghost town. If there is anything that all the years of marketing research has proven it's that people need to be told what to do if you expect them to do anything at all. Think about it.

by Sage Lewis Best Buy wants you to tell them the moment you walk into the store. From Marketing Pilgrim : "The "shopkick" system is designed to detect and reward shoppers just for walking into a Best Buy store. In order to accomplish this feat, consumers must download an application to their smart phone. " What do you think of this? I'm all about it! Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Stoney deGeyter In my last post, I talked about training your text to "engage", "inform", "speak" )call to action(, and "convert". The first step is to make sure the content doesn't overstay it's welcome . In this post, I'll provide some of the tricks you can teach your content; training it how to do all of these things by making it skim-able, scan-able and provide exits to where the visitor needs to go next.

by Stone Reuning One of the best ways to add content to your website and boost your search engine rankings is through an optimized press release. You can write about any newsworthy item going on at your company: a new product, an industry award, new hires are just a few examples. Announcing these events has several benefits beyond search engine rankings too. Journalists and bloggers for instance will come across it and perhaps do a story about your firm.

by Sage Lewis If you aren't familiar with Google Places please watch this video. It's growing and could be significantly affecting your business without your knowing. Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Mike Fleming Google's Display Network has two types of targeting options. The first, automatic placements , we've talked about already. This is where you create keyword-themed ad groups and Google makes your ads eligible to appear on web pages whose content theme matches the theme of the keywords in your ad group. Now, we'll talk about the second - managed placements . This type of campaign is useful for two purposes: 1.

by Stoney deGeyter We don't often realize this, but we can train our website content to do tricks. Unfortunately, most website content just lays around all day. This is why you see high bounce rates and poor conversion rates on so many websites. About the only "trick" this content knows how to do is to roll-over and play dead. But, those aren't tricks at all. The opossum that streaked across the highway after getting hit by a truck can do that!

by Stoney deGeyter I remember the first day back at my sophomore year of college. It was the weekend before classes began, and the new students were moving into the dorms. There were cars and trucks all parked out along the street with students unloading furniture, bedding, clothes, and everything else a growing college kid needs to survive in the almost-real world. I remember this day vividly because a bunch of us guys were scouting out the hot chicks ,

by Mike Fleming Now that you've created your keyword-themed ad groups and masterfully rolled out your display ads for those ad groups , your ads are running and collecting impressions, clicks and conversions. The next step is to allow a fair amount of data to collect so that you can then analyze how different sites are performing for you . The most useful tool for this is the Placement Performance Report in your Google AdWords account.

by Stoney deGeyter One of the most important things business owners often fail to do is to make their website remarkable. It really doesn't matter what industry you're in or how many other websites you're competing against, making your site stand out from the pack is absolutely essential. Take the movie Avatar. Plot: Tired. Story: Been there, done that. Acting and directing: Nothing special. Special affects: Absolutely outstanding.

by Stone Reuning One of the important pieces of building high search engine rankings and driving traffic to your website is keyword phrases. In the old days of SEO, you could simply pepper your web pages with high value keywords and the search engines would rank you right up there with the best of them. But with today's more advanced search engines, content on your site has to achieve more than that.

by Stoney deGeyter Finding keywords is easy. Finding the right keywords, organizing them into optimizable groups, and determining where and how they get optimized into the site is another story all together. Generally, keyword research is done at the hands of the SEO. Taking those keywords and integrating them into the content is the job of the Copywriter. Under most circumstances, you want defer to the person who has the strongest skills for each particular task.

by Stoney deGeyter Remember the movie Old School with Vince Vaughn and Will Farrell? Yeah, me neither. That's because, while I'm sure the movie has some funny scenes, it just didn't have the staying power of, say... Tommy Boy . Of course Tommy Boy had a very distinct advantage out of the gate... it didn't star Will Farrell. You really can't come back from that kind of thing. In the SEO world there is "old school" and then there is "old school SEO nonsense".

by Miriam Ellis If you own a local business and get a phone call from a rep identifying himself as contacting you from Google )even if the call is coming from India(, don't make the mistake of assuming it's yet another annoying phone scam. Mike Blumenthal has just reported confirmation from Google that these phone calls are legitimate and are part of Google's 2010 effort to clean up local business data quality.