Search engine marketing (SEM) has evolved to become the most reliable strategy for reaching your target audience and driving conversions on the internet. It compels your market to visit your website; it boosts your company’s exposure within your space; it positions your product as the solution to their problems. As a result, your sales increase. [...]

Reverse SEO has become critical for all types of organizations. Throughout history, it has never been easier for your customers, competitors, and employees to publish items online that can have a negative impact on your business. If those items gain exposure in Google, Yahoo!, and other major search engines, their effects can last for years. [...]

If you have a web site that you have been maintaining and updating on a consistent basis for several years, chances are, you have acquired some decent traffic from the search engines. The thing that most webmasters don’t consider is that once they have that search engine traffic, it doesn’t mean it will stay forever. [...]

There is no other way to put it; the World Wide Web is big business. As an example, you only have to look at the phenomenal success of the online bookstore, Amazon. In 2008, Amazon brought in over nineteen billion dollars in income, yet only required an operating budget of approximately eight hundred and fifty [...]

After years of running websites and earning a full-time online income, I am constantly reminded that it all comes down to keywords. Actually, it all comes down to obtaining top rankings for your profitable keywords in the search engines, mainly Google. And that statement has to be refined even further, it’s all about obtaining top [...]

A company called X+1 released a study last week   that highlighted the pain felt by many buying keywords from Google and the other engines. Satisfaction with the performance of their companies’ SEM campaigns was egregiously poor: on a scale of 1 to 7, only 12% of respondents gave SEM a top-ranked 7, with 57% ranking [...]

Fellow search insider columnist Aaron Goldman and I have been batting at the RFP pinata for the past few weeks, because our view is that using RFPs to select SEM agencies clearly doesn’t work very well, either on the client or the agency side. Unfortunately, I am doubtful that our modest reforms to the procurement [...]

A storm in a tea cup has been brewing in the search industry over the past few days. It was prompted by Jill Whalen’s recent blog post titled We Don’t Need SEO Standards where she came to the conclusion that she didn’t think the search industry needed standards or regulation, at least in relation to [...]