The inexperienced AdWords user often leaves the default settings active, a good idea or big mistake depending on the feature in question as well as the nature of the account. When it comes to the Content Network, many SEO experts advise turning it off entirely, claiming it a waste of resources better spent optimizing for Google search alone. Advice to be taken seriously, given some of the inadequacies of the Content Network feature. For one, the nature of the sites in the Content Network assigned to a given account is for the most part shrouded in mystery. Your ads may show on high-traffic, topically-related blogs, thus reaching a targeting users that may otherwise have been missed. Or they might be inappropriately generated on a site like MySpace or even as a result of a Gmail user’s account (a new and slightly creepy feature!) based on the still-limited technology by which relevancy between an ad and actual page content is assessed. Read More

What do YouTube, Marxist theory, and the attention economy have to do with SEO? Blogger (and author of Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture) John Battelle writes:

“SEO is persuasion. We live in a world of persuasion. Our attention is constantly being sought after. I see SEO as a tactical way to persuade someone to pay attention to a piece of information.” Read More

Today’s SEO researcher enjoys the choice between numerous keyword generation tools, each of which offers their own relative strengths and weaknesses.

Take, for example, both Yahoo’s Overture Keyword Selector Tool and the Keyword Discovery Tool. I use these two interchangeably, often because what I expect to be fairly common search terms bring up no data in one or the other database. I’m hesitant to trust either tool completely, mostly because of some strange inconsistencies as well as the skewed nature of the data. Not to mention the irritating way both are prone to crashing, and require frequently reloading the page. Read More