No, it's not a gimmick. Search vet Anthony Kirlew's suggestion isn't black-hat either, it's just a simple formula for generating an abundance of inbound links over time. Spend half an hour each day strategically commenting on blogs and you can reap the link-building rewards (not to mention raising the visibility of your site and developing a presence within your chosen niche). Finding blogs in your niche worth commenting on is likely an easy task, but Kirlew says it's the persistent effort that counts. Block out time each day to contribute to the discussion and you will end up …

Many site owners do an annual revamp in January, and while freshening up the look and feel of a site is necessary, Jennifer Norene advises Webmasters not to forget to tweak the copy as well. With this post she provides 12 basic rules of thumb for crafting SEO-friendly copy, including the cornerstone of developing a keyword strategy. After choosing two to three paid or organic keywords for each page, try to integrate them into key paragraph headers and some body copy. See how the page ranks for those terms for a predetermined amount of time, change it, and …

In December, Google Analytics rolled out the new "ga.js" tracking code, and while not everyone needs to upgrade, Caitlin Minteer explains the benefits of migrating to the new system for those who have Flash-based or multimedia-heavy sites. The ga.js code offers Event Tracking, a feature that tracks "events" that don't necessarily generate new pageviews. Embedding this code will give you detailed data on things like users dragging-and-dropping on a Google Map, clicking on buttons or images and other AJAX or Flash-based actions. Minteer cautions site owners that ga.js is not compatible with the previous tracking code, …

AdWords may be the most powerful and widely used search marketing platform, but it's still a bad channel for advertisers to invest in if they can't get a good ROI. Leighton James illustrates a number of the mistakes search marketers can make when using AdWords--from failing to direct users to customized landing pages, to running campaigns on the content network without modifying bids--and how they can erode the bottom line. Avoid the trap of crafting long lists of generic keywords and work to develop a highly targeted set of words for your niche. "Don't trick yourself into thinking …

How much more effectively could you run your paid search campaigns if there were a universal campaign management platform for AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN's adCenter? Greg Meyers poses that question with this piece, and also serves up three reasons why having one such platform would make the lives of search marketers that much easier. On the efficiency front, a universal ad editing platform would streamline the process of routine (daily, weekly and monthly) keyword and ad copy changes, and it would also simplify the process of porting complex campaign structures from one PPC engine to the …

The SEOmoz team came up with a set of New Year's resolutions for the search engines in 2008. For Google, it's about coming forward with a clear stance on the great "Paid Link Debate of 2007," and letting Webmasters know exactly how to handle future linking strategies. Rand Fishkin also advises the giant to clone Matt Cutts, or rather, hire industry evangelists like him who really know their product to represent Google to new, possibly antagonistic, communities. For example, snag someone with years of radio experience who can effectively explain why buying (or selling) a radio spot via …

Deciding which of the myriad search marketing conferences to attend can be hard--let alone justifying why you need to spend a few thousand dollars to attend a few, or whether to agree to speak on a particular panel. So Todd Mintz corralled a number of veteran search conference attendees and speakers to give their take on the virtues of these industry mixers. Mark Knowles says that he's never had a bad experience at a search conference, and that he can almost always apply something he's learned from a panelist, keynote speaker or just in casual conversation with other …

Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask don't just rule the roost for core search in the U.S.--they also dominate when it comes to search market share across the pond. The Big Four are so dominant in the UK that they've sent nearly 50 smaller search engines to the dead pool within 3 years, according to Phil Bradley. Back in 2005, Bradley posted a list of some 164 engines UK searchers could use, including shopping engines and others complete with Web 2.0 names like "Beegoo," "Fush," and "Wahooma"--and wanted to make sure the list was updated once we rang in …

Richard Burckhardt explains how each of the search engines uses a page's meta-description data a bit differently to come up with the short description that shows up on a SERP. Google seems to primarily use the meta-description data -- but will grab a sentence or phrase containing the keyword in its absence, and MSN does the same. Meanwhile, Yahoo typically uses the meta-description tag together with snippets of the keyword-containing sentence in most cases. Yahoo will also search for a Yahoo Directory listing description, and all three will resort to using DMOZ description data if nothing else is …

While the beginning of the year is time for the assessment of last year's campaigns and the germination of new campaign ideas, the Rimm Kaufman search team says that there's still room to make major paid search errors. And mistakes made now can drag down performance for the rest of the year, so George Michie recommends avoiding these traps. First, make sure you monitor your automated PPC campaign management tools, because December's conversion-heavy traffic will skew results and the program will continue (wrongfully) to spend heavily in January. Next, think about whether you need to scrap all of …