Sequoia Capital, a VC firm known for its early-stage investments in powerhouses like Google, Yahoo and Apple, has reportedly poured at least $1 million into Kenshoo, an Israeli startup in the SEM automation space. Much like Clickable, Kenshoo's services aim to streamline the bid management process, and also provide actionable advice on how to better optimize campaigns with different keywords, among other options. While Kenshoo is going up against giants in the space like Omniture and aQuantive's Atlas Solutions, it is likely that its focus is on the "longer tail" of businesses -- where there is still …

Omar Tawakol has left his position at Medio Systems to head up an online marketing startup called BlueKai. Seattle-based Medio's technology powers on-deck search for giants like Verizon and T-Mobile -- and Tawakol served as chief advertising officer, spearheading the company's push into mobile advertising. Author John Cook wonders if Tawakol's departure may seriously hinder Medio's business development strategy, as he helped orchestrate the company's recently inked search and ad deals with CBS in the U.S. and mInfo to power search in China. BlueKai is in serious stealth mode, with just snippets of information available on …

If you want a quick primer of the value of an inbound link, check out Search Engine Land's graphic illustration on this topic, showing three perspectives: the SEM specialist's, the search engines', and the salesperson's.

Carrie Hill explains how small business owners can turn social media campaigns that are generally high on traffic and light on conversions into actual sales.

Hoping to drive more traffic to its site, Ask.com is scheduled to launch AskEraser, a feature that removes a user's search request from Ask.com computers mere hours after searching. "We definitely want to stand out from the other guys," said Doug Leeds, Ask.com's senior vice president of product management. "This level of control is unprecedented and unmatched."

After Google's recent updates to geo-targeting function within AdWords, blogger John decided to write an analysis of geo-targeting options in AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing, delineating "the subtle differences" between the two tools.

Anchor Intelligence is the latest third-party company to offer click auditing services for paid search advertisers. With former eBay exec Ken Miller at the helm as founder and CEO, Anchor Intelligence has secured a total of $6 million in funding and partnered with at least 50 ad networks for click fraud detection. The company is slated to announce a major ad network partner in the coming weeks, according to Miller, though no details on the pricing structure for advertisers was given. Anchor Intelligence joins companies like Click Forensics and Authenticlick as advertiser advocates in the fight against …

Following up on a previous post on the most common PPC campaign problems, Joe from Hanapin Marketing offers advice for tackling three more issues -- from a lack of traffic, to poor click-through rates and low ad positions. You can't drive conversions unless users actually click on your ads -- so Joe advocates improving CTRs through writing and testing new ad copy. Take your best-performing ad and use it as a control, then see how the new ads measure up. To counter low ad position, increasing bids is the first and most obvious step -- and …

Matt McGee has screenshots of blended search in action with Microsoft's Live Search. Using searches for "furniture," "PlayStation 3" and "Ron Paul," he illustrates how each set of results contained a mix of local, video, news and shopping results, as appropriate. Microsoft enlists user feedback to help improve the overall relevance and functionality of its blended search -- asking "Is this useful?" next to the headline of each subset of results, and giving users the option to click yes or no. As an example of how Microsoft is working out the kinks, McGee notes that when …

Sometimes search firms get clients with no PPC experience and can start campaigns from scratch -- but often clients come with ad groups, keywords and landing pages already in action, and those campaigns need to be assessed for their performance and overall value. Craig Danuloff offers a roadmap for evaluating existing paid search accounts, as part of Commerce360's ongoing, online case study of its new client Onlynaturalpet.com. Evaluating a new client's existing campaigns involves getting deep into the sorting and structure of ad groups, and asking questions like whether the keywords are of appropriate quality, quantity and diversity. …