The Semvironment team has written up a pretty extensive guide to keyword list expansion and negative keywords, part of the search firm's ongoing "PPC Management" series of posts. The nine-part guide offers links to individual sections, as well as a massive list of sample negative keywords (as a .txt file). Keyword list expansion "consists of taking the keywords that are ranking well organically and that are generating conversions and efficiently adding them to your campaigns and ad groups," the guide says. The team offers details on how expanding your keyword list can affect your overall quality score as …

Ian Lurie posts five steps you can take each day to "steadily build credibility" in various social media outlets. Think about them as being your social media multivitamin -- and the best part is, they take about two minutes each! You'll need to have a Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and Stumbleupon account (and the toolbar) to get this all done. First, bookmark and review two businesses in Google Maps. "If I can't find two to review, then I add one or two to 'my maps' instead," Lurie says. "This activity (I suspect) makes me a more important reviewer …

Luke cites a report from Jupiter Research that found that just over half of all search marketers are integrating their search efforts with other marketing channels -- be they on- or offline. So what's with the other half of the pack that aren't? "The fact that separate departments manage these marketing initiatives independent of one another is one of the most common factors," he says. So to get the offline marketing team's buy-in, Luke offers some quick campaign integration tips that show how simple (and beneficial) it is to have search and print, TV and even radio efforts …

Jonathan Tuliani digs into one of the reports bundled into the latest version of adCenter, the Analytics Path report. "Most analytics reports tell you about the visitors to individual pages of your web site," he says. "By contrast, the Path report shows you how visitors actually navigate through your site, from page to page. This information can be very valuable in understanding user behavior and identifying problem pages." You can create a report to track any possible navigation path to or from a source page. Tuliani's examples show a report that tracks how users get to the "help" …

So what do you do after you've researched a massive list of keywords? You manage that list with a tool that keeps it organized a little bit better than Excel does. Ann Smarty reviews Traffic Travis and Web CEO, two desktop apps that do just that. Traffic Travis lets you organize key phrases into groups based on one specific keyword. There are a ton of filtering options (for example, you can find partial or inverted duplicate phrases), and it costs about $100. Web CEO organizes keywords into baskets using whichever criteria you choose. Smarty says that …

The search giant has been extremely forthcoming in the past few weeks, with blog posts that detail the ins and outs of its search algorithm, the human reviewers behind the numbers, and tips about how to find a good SEO. The trend continues with a revamp to the "Submit Your Content" page for Webmasters, which Danny Sullivan has recrowned "Content Central." Google has also launched a Content Central blog to coincide with the launch. The retooled site highlights the four major content areas: Web, local, media and items for sale. "Within each area, there are links to appropriate …

Joe Teixeira schools readers on five Google Analytics metrics that most likely go unused. First up is the $Index, which gives each page on your site an average value. "It takes the amount of either Ecommerce Revenue or Goal Value that each page was responsible for, and divides it by the number of Pageviews for each page to give you a financial value in your currency of choice," he says. Meanwhile, percent of search exits tells you the percentage of visitors that leave immediately after conducting a site search (if your site has that capability). "These people did …

"Using a web search engine like Google is usually fine for casual searches, but when you need to delve deep into a subject, it just won't do," says Sarah Perez. "What you really need is a research engine that explores the unindexed reaches of the Deep Web. For that, there's now Infovell, 'the world's research engine.'" Infovell crawls info vaults, including PubMed Central (a trove of medical and health-based journals), claims filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, as well as various academic publications that are open for the perusing, but not indexable by the major engines. …

Microsoft only acquired semantic search startup Powerset about a month ago, but the integration has already greatly improved Live Search in three key ways: better Wikipedia captions, better related search suggestions and better answers to question-style queries. Before the integration, Wikipedia snippets showed up as sentence fragments in Live Search results; now, the captions are more substantial. Meanwhile, searchers will find more Live Search Answers in the results thanks to Freebase, an open source database that Powerset was already pulling from. Lastly, users will get better related search suggestions, as Live Search is using Powerset's Factz technology to …