David Szetela offers an extensive tutorial on the essentials of crafting "killer" PPC ads, including everything from touting your competitive advantage (awards and accolades), using a decisive call to action, highlighting benefits as opposed to features, and even creating a sense of urgency. And he includes examples of each tactic. He also explains the one and only goal of a PPC ad. "Let's agree on one thing: the objective of your ad," Szetela says. "Is it to sell your product? Get a sales lead? Nope. Your ad's objective is this, and only this: Get the click."

Erik Collier digs into the latest iteration of Ask's foray into semantic search, searchable TV listings--proving that innovation is still alive and well at the sometimes forgotten engine. "Our Ask TV listings uses our patent-pending technology DADS (Direct Answers from Databases) to answer queries and questions from structured data feeds and databases," Collier says. "DADS provides highly accurate answers to queries which are relevant to a given topic. Instead of using traditional keyword search algorithms, our technology can deliver much deeper, more precise search results based on understanding of a query meaning rather than syntactical text matching." …

"Click Fraud has been a serious concern for careful marketers for a long time now," says Joy Brazelle. "But Click Fraud also has become a scape-goat for some poorly performing campaign symptoms caused by laziness or lack of knowledge." For example, a high bounce rate/low average time on site could be attributed to click fraud, but it could also be a symptom of a mismatch between a highly descriptive ad and a generic or even irrelevant landing page. Meanwhile, low conversion rates could be symptoms of an overly complex or broken shopping cart. Sometimes a high …

Adam Henige uses demographic data from Hitwise to make a case for maintaining your paid search spend with Yahoo. "Google, regardless of it's [sic] market share, still may not cover all of your bases in terms of your online marketing goals," he says. "It's important to keep an eye on the types of audiences in your search engine marketing planning process." For example, the Hitwise stats revealed that Yahoo has become a popular engine with younger audiences. Almost 43% of Yahoo searchers are under the age of 35, while only 38% of Google users fit that age range. …

Practical eCommerce has reviewed many a site in terms of overall usability and SEO, but this time the company has stepped up to the chopping block for a critique of its own redesign. Alan Cox digs into the usability and conversion potential of the new and improved practicalecommerce.com, concluding that "with a few upgrades, the web site could take a few steps forward in meeting its own business goals of increasing participation"--not to mention pumping up the value of any advertising present. The new site scores high marks for its clean, straightforward design and multiple …

DriverSide, the newly launched hub for car owners, has already made its first acquisition, picking up fairBenjamin, an auto mechanic search engine. DriverSide currently offers a wealth of content surrounding vehicle maintenance, service shop reviews and news, but the move is seen as an attempt to better compete on the repairs and maintenance front with rival site RepairPal. "The acquisition is hoped to improve DriverSide's repair service data and estimates for common repairs; and possibly add new dimensions to its service that are based on fairBenjamin's service model," says Mike Boland. "This mostly involves anonymously shopping out repair …

If you're struggling to get the deeper content on your site indexed, Ann Smarty has some tips for enticing the engines' crawlers to dig in and spend more time. First, make sure you have an accurate count of the number of indexed pages. Go beyond the standard "site" parameter and check for the number of pages indexed in each directory and sub-directory. Also, check to see what the most recently indexed pages are. Armed with this info, you can try to identify any patterns in the pages that weren't indexed. For example, are there any internal pages that …

Blog posts tied to breaking news often suffer from a limited shelf-life--but they can help garner lots of juice-passing links that can help propel your blog (or the encompassing site) to the top of the organic listings. And there's a new plugin for WordPress bloggers that lets you automatically create 301 redirects so that you can pass the juice on from those highly-trafficked posts. Search Engine People developed the free plugin, which is available at http://www.searchenginepeople.com/tools/wp-301redirect.zip. It allows you to redirect any blot post or page to any other post or page--whether its internal or external--simply by entering the …