This post focuses on 10 useful tips for running a travel PPC campaign, but there are many interesting takeaways you can use for other verticals. Richard Fergie wrote the post after attending a Google AdWords Webinar about online travel trends based on a comScore study of 50,000 UK web users. Nearly half of all travel searches are brand-related. Thirty six percent of people who buy holiday travel packages use a brand search first and immediately before purchasing, so bid on branded keywords in your PPC campaigns. Use day-parting for PPC; people are 30% more likely to purchase a trip …

There's a big disconnect in the way marketers allocate dollars to campaigns focused on search engines, according to a recent post from Rand Fishkin. He reviews available data from comScore, Enquiro and others to pose several questions -- such as, why does paid search earn so many more marketing dollars, what can SEOs and the SEO industry do to help bring parity to this equation, and does a down economy mean SEO will be given greater opportunity to perform? The conclusion: SEO drives 75%+ of all search traffic, yet garners less than 15% of marketing budgets for SEM campaigns. …

Don't put SEO off until after you have built an ecommerce application. It can become a costly mistake. Chris Boggs notes an internal case study showing that a site owner could have saved in excess of $100,000 by incorporating SEO into the interactive design plan,rather than going back and making changes to an existing site after completed. To keep other Webmasters from making that mistake, the post examines three topics to consider when adding SEO factors to an e-commerce application: internal process, out-of-the-box functionality, and content equity.

How do you make the most of your online budget? Here are a few tips that might help. Dorian Sweet looks at three possibilities, reminding us that reach and frequency are typically the rule when budgets are big, but as they shrink we must concentrate on the types of content that attract people to the site. One you have them, evaluate their time spent on the site. Knowing how long they have stayed becomes valuable currency to convince executive management to approve bigger budgets for future projects. It also becomes important to assess brand relevance. Is your SEO …

Need to take a break from listing keywords and coding text? For those times when Google, Yahoo or MSN cannot find the song, but know the words and the tune, you might want to rely on a dedicated search engine for finding music. This post lists some of the best search engines for finding music online. Many of these sites let you search and then play the songs. Seeqpod, for example, is a MP3 search engine that indexes high quality tunes. It lets you play the files directly in the search results window, as well as create a …

In one beta tester's opinion, the Omnitures, Web Trends, and Coremetrics of the world should be very concerned about Google's new (free) enterprise-level analytics. Jeff Campbell believes the search engine's release of new features this week addresses shortcomings in typical Web analytics packages. Of the announced additions, Advanced Segments and Custom Reporting have had the biggest impact for this user who loves to slice, dice, and segment visitors as many ways as possible, Campbell writes. Not only does Advanced Segments eliminate the need for Profiles, you have back-populated, detailed data on the fly that rivals Omniture's premium Discover service.

When sales drop off, marketing budgets are typically the first to get cut. I know. I turned toward journalism the last time I was cut from a marketing budget in 1999 (surprise!). So, what should you do if your marketing budget is slashed? While your management wants you to react immediately, you know that an ill-considered elimination of marketing support can quickly translate into a disastrous drop in sales, according to Heidi Cohn. Cohn takes us through ways to redirect your marketing budget to maximize results by outlining three steps to consider your current business situation, and three …

It's possible to create decent titles and meta descriptions from a hunch, or popular search phrases based on your own knowledge and experience. But really good titles and description tags are built on good data and the revenue based on quality key phrases. Once you research the data on what people actually search for and buy, then you can work on optimizing title tags. Remember to list the most important key phrases in the beginning of the string when writing title tags. Put your main key phrase at the start of the title. Try and fit in a …

You may think good organic search campaigns will deliver the most effective traffic on your site, but that's not always the case. In fact, there are some instances in which you'd do best to focus your limited marketing dollars elsewhere, according to Jennifer Laycock. Search engine optimization is not complicated, but it's very easy to do the wrong thing, or claim you can optimize a site without having the skills to back it up. So for starters, when hiring a SEO, remember to make sure your company can benefit from search engine marketing services. Make sure you have …

Making video content searchable. That's every video company's dream. EveryZing this week launched MetaPlayer, a video player that emphasizes SEO, search and indexing. Similar to other video search companies that offer a combination of video indexing technologies, Everyzing's technology is based on speech-to-text processing. The intellectual property comes from the government research giant BBN Technologies. MetaPlayer's features include searching for words in a transcript that land the searcher at the beginning part of the video where that word was uttered. It also does speech-to-text processing in near-real time. This important index capability lets searchers find and view content …