Have you forgotten about your SEO strategy in preparation to brace for the onslaught of consumers rushing to your site to make purchases this holiday season? Jack Aaronson offers tips and tricks for quick fixes you still have time to make, though your IT staff is probably in lockdown mode to support the holiday traffic. Aaronson suggests checking your product pages to make sure the product name appears in the title page. Make sure the landing pages have clear visual imagery and calls to action that connect to the paid search ad. And, review call to actions, sale …

Mathias Ahlgren explains how to find available domain names that contain the keywords people search for most. Finding and registering these names can bring in organic traffic and make excellent landing pages. Ahlgren suggests using them to build or redirect links, too. Ahlegren steps you through the process. He offers up tips on using the Google AdWords keyword tool and a "bulk whois checker" to find the most searchable words. Relying on this process, he found the available domain names mostpopularlaptop.com, "most powerful laptop," gets 1000 exact searches, and bestbudgetlaptop.com, "best budget laptop," receives 590 exact searches on …

Advertise on multiple search engines, duplicate ads across multiple sites to increase awareness, combine multi-search approaches to improve clicks and return on investments -- and always remember that consumer behavior reflects economic trends. These were the akeaways from a panel Mel Carson attended this week at Pubcon in Las Vegas. Carson encapsulates the panel discussion in the blog post, adding SEM tips provided by Doug Stotland from the adCenter team. Stotland points toward adapting and adopting to market changes, improving CTR that can increase volume and lower your CPCs, and building out capabilities to capitalize on new SEO …

If you are a fly-by-the-seat-of your-pants type of person, you might want to set some rules for a successful SEO campaign even before you begin building or rebuilding your site. For starters, determine the problems the SEO campaign will solve. Set goals, establish a team, identify your audience, choose strategy and tactics, measure results, and adjust and repeat. These are the steps to a successful campaign, according to Matt McGee. McGee suggests one goals might be increasing organic traffic. No matter the goal, it all boils down to preparation and planning. "As the saying goes, luck happens when …

Google has published an "SEO Starter Guide" to answer some of the questions you may have about search engine optimization. The compact guide list some best practices that the Google team and many webmasters follow to improve their sites' "crawlability and indexing." The 22-page guide steps through about a dozen optimization topics, such as improving titles and descriptions meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, and content creation. On the last page you will find a list of links, as well as helpful resources in case you get stuck, including tips on hiring an SEO, so you don't go …

Though Apple and Google have long had close ties, they're about to become more competitive with each other, with Google's Android positioned against the iPod globally, and rumors of Apple working on search products. Loren Baker contemplates whether an Apple/Google split would mean that Apple acquires Yahoo. As Baker points out, an Apple/Yahoo acquisition could have all kinds of product synergies, such as Yahoo OneSearch on the iPhone, as well as an easy integration of Yahoo's SearchMonkey into the iPhone app store. The post does a lot of dreaming and speculation in its analysis of a possible Apple …

Agency.com, a unit of Omnicom Group, filed a lawsuit in the Dallas, Texas, state court against rival digital-ad firm and SEM agency iCrossing, alleging it poached several of its top executives and clients. Also at stake, according to the suit: proprietary information and trade secrets. The focus of the lawsuit shines the spotlight on Donald Scales, iCrossing's CEO, who held the same position at Agency.com until parting ways with the company in 2006. The news, originally reported by The Wall Street Journal, is encapsulated in Daya Baran's blog post.

Don't rely on existing target keyword demand. Create your own. Sound advice from Erik Daffron, who believes building the hill, rather than climbing it, returns better results (his analogy, not mine). If you're a brand, become the "helpful" reliable and authoritative voice of online communities and forums. Consumers will reference your products because you have the knowledge to answer specific technical questions. Daffron also suggests tying your SEM efforts to television and outdoor advertising. He provides an example of a successful campaign, but concludes before "you spawn massive amounts of search demand for new query phrases," prepare for the …

Google's Broad Match can help put unexpected, yet relevant AdWord queries to work for you. "When you include a keyword as a broad match, your corresponding ad is not only eligible to appear alongside queries with that exact spelling," but can also capture "keyword expansions that include synonyms, singular/plural forms, relevant variants of your keywords, and phrases containing your keywords," writes Amanda Kelly. The search query report has been improved recently to provide more details on the queries that trigger ads for your broad match keywords. Kelly explains this means better results, with less traffic possibly reported under …

If you duplicate content, work without keyword research, land traffic on the wrong page, ignore link-building, obsess over rankings, or have a set-it-and-forget-it mentality, this post is for you. Carrie Hill takes you through these six mistakes and tells you how to fix them. Take duplicate content, for example. Hill describes a few types, but calls attention to duplicate page titles and meta descriptions, which she describes as the most common. If you built your site in WordPress, "you could be innocently serving archive and category pages that duplicate content on individual post pages of your site," she …