"Secondary search--the implementation of a secondary SEM team to complement existing search campaigns--can do wonders for an organization," says Larry Organ. "But it's still under the radar for many marketers." That may be an understatement. Organ offers an overview of the practice of hiring one search team (typically in house, and typically for large companies) to focus on one set of paid and organic search terms, while the other team devotes their time to a different crop of keywords, ad text and landing pages. "Primarily, organizations that do so can expect to dominate search engine positions, outmaneuver industry …

Yahoo has upgraded its Click Quality Center, adding tools like a submission form to initiate a click investigation and a new Q&A column where a Yahoo expert answers advertiser click fraud questions. Reggie Davis also lists some reasons that YSM advertisers might see an unexpected spike in clicks or impressions, ranging from changes in an ad's overall rank, to keyword seasonality, to having an ad run on Yahoo Buzz or the Yahoo front page. Davis says it's best to eliminate all of these possibly positive reasons for increased traffic before assuming there's a click fraud problem.

Matt McGee thinks so. In fact, he thinks they're the most overrated SEO tactic out there. And in light of a slew of recent discussions extolling the virtues of XML sitemaps, McGee lists the reasons that he thinks the navigation guides get too much attention. First, McGee says that they don't solve any real indexing or crawlability problems--sitemaps just mask them. "If you have a 100-page site, and the spiders can only access 25 of your pages, fix your crawlability problems," he says. "Using a sitemap to solve crawlability issues is never a good idea. It's like putting …

Samuel Dean reviews Piwik and Visitorville, two analytics programs that can be used to supplement your existing free or subscription-based platforms. Piwik is an open-source platform that gets a constant influx of widget-style plug-ins from a group of rabid developers. "And these let you see unusual views of your site data," Dean says. You can add and delete the widgets from your Piwik dashboard to create a customized analytics suite. Meanwhile, Visitorville offers a unique take on traffic reporting. "Rather than the usual numbers and graphics found in site analytics products, it shows your site traffic …

Got the most relevant, mind-blowing article for link bait? Check. Got a list of bloggers to start building rapport with? Check. You may think that you're all set to start link building. But as Loren Baker notes, many Webmasters roll out a link-building campaign without making sure that their site is ready (and worthy) for the influx of links and traffic it may receive. "[As] you would do to your vehicle before a long road trip, before going about a link building campaign, give your site an inspection and tune up," Baker says. Start with the basics, like …

While most companies have developed a search-based damage control strategy in the event of bad publicity or a major customer service snafu, Jeff Quipp suggests that doing some preemptive reputation management (PRM) could actually save time (and face) when something does go wrong. It starts with identifying the term or terms that pose the greatest risk to the company. Build up as many powerful pages as possible to rank for those terms, and then maintain and strengthen those pages continually over time. With proper PRM, Quipp says that at least 90% of the negative stories about …

Ah yes, yet another social media-oriented search engine. This time it's Scoofers, a Netherlands-based service that pulls in data from social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit to help rank the results. Scoofers offers a number of query refinement options, allowing users to drill down by categories like celebrities/gossip, reference/Wikipedia and even by demos like senior citizens or teens. The engine uses aggregated social bookmarking data to determine which categories a given page should fall under. Four vertical search engines (travel, electronics, party & dining, and fashion shopping) are accessible from the Scoofers.com main page as …

Advertisers with extra marketing dollars to spend don't have to reinvest their entire surplus with Google or Yahoo, or even Live Search or Ask. The Internet yellow pages (IYP) providers also offer PPC ad platforms, and Bill Hartzer reviews a number of them in this piece. First up is Yellowpages.com, which averages 100 million monthly searches. Basic listings (for stores with physical locations) are free, and the company also offers "YPclicks!" which allows business owners to buy PPC ads on a monthly basis. Meanwhile, Superpages.com also offers free basic listings, in addition to PPC and pay-per-call …