Budgets drive SEO and pay-per-click campaigns, so it's important to apply best practices and think logically about the structure that works best for your business. Kevin Lee steps through the process for setting up PPC campaigns, and reminds us that depending on the engine, the amount of control you have at the campaign level differs. Remember the general idea when setting up campaigns is to "match some logical business or financial structure or to make reporting match other kinds of marketing or media," he writes. Google allows for about 25 campaigns per account. Most businesses can work within …

Google has added an application protocol interface (API) that lets webmasters access message control data through the Message Center. The new feature, Message Center GData API, lets you retrieve messages, and mark as read/unread or delete them. Javier Tordable explains until now this wasn't possible. "Now you can also use GData to access it as a feed," he writes. "This way you don't need to continually check your messages in Webmaster Tools, you can retrieve the messages feed automatically and be informed as soon as possible of any critical issues regarding your site."

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo want to make content on U.S. government Web sites searchable. About 1,000 of them are inaccessible to search engine crawlers, according to Peter Whoriskey, citing stats from J.L. Needham, Google's manager of public-sector content partnerships. You can't search by name for enforcement actions on any given company at the Environmental Protection Agency, pictures of specific ancient Egyptian artifact at the Smithsonian, or details of a Vietnam War casualty, Whoriskey writes. That's because the U.S. government has been unwilling or unable to make millions of its Web pages accessible by searching online.

Make sure you don't have inbound links pointing to pages that no longer exist on your site, links that were built based on services or products you no longer offer, and links from sites that no longer exist. Julie Joyce believes you need to review your link-building techniques and links to your site periodically because what works today might not tomorrow. Following guidelines means you likely won't have to go back and fix problems from the past, but Joyce suggests taking a look back at old content posted to your site to ensure it continues to perform well before …

Lower-third click-through ads and product placements appearing in YouTube videos have allowed some creators to rake in the big buck for clips that find their way to top positions, but it's a "fool's game" to chase the No. 1 spot on the site, notes Aaron Wall, analyzing a recent article in the New York Times. Wall believes if more people chase that opportunity it will only pollute the medium and force relevancy algorithms to show less diversity, making it more difficult to get noticed amidst the noise. "Google encourages cut throat competition to create diversity, and then filters …

Examine keyword criteria and group them by popularity, strength and quality. That's what Michael Murray does to step us through the process of picking and applying the best keywords. Marketers who understand the dynamics of a client's marketplace can easily adjust tools to properly interpret relative popularity of the hundreds of candidates being evaluated. "Let's pretend you want to rank well for 'airline tickets,' which people search for 2.7 million times a month on average across Google and its search network," Murray writes. "The Web site ranking No. 1 has 168,000 indexed pages and files. Not many Web …

Set your Web site name and slogan, turn on clean URLs, set up customer error pages. Gregory Heller provides these tips to help you create a SEO strategy if you're using Drupal, the content management platform. The post highlights the five most important modules that improve SEO for Drupal sites. Among the tools Drupal provides, Heller points to the Path Auto Module that lets you create URL aliases for your nodes and the Meta Tags Module to add meta tag data to the site.

Ensure your site URLs return the correct status code and track what status code Google receives with help of Google Webmaster tools, writes Ann Smarty, citing tips from the Google Webmaster Central Blog. Smarty has had some useful status code-related discussions and wanted to summarize them in this blog post, adding a bit of guidance from past experience. Smarty points to the use of 503 ("Service Unavailable") headers response code if your site goes above bandwidth, and recommends using status code 304 ("Not Modified") for pages that were not updated to economize on Google crawl budget. "This will …

The predictions for 2009 have begun to roll in. Virginia Nussey summarizes a conversation with Steve Baldwin on his most recent post in MediaPost's Search Insider. Nussey points to Baldwin's prediction that keyword prices will continue to rise, the SEO profession will grow, and the fact that traditional media is "on its last leg" as likely scenarios to play out next year, but disagrees with his forecast on Web 2.0, which seems to have stemmed from a comment made by Razorfish CEO Clark Kokich in iMedia last month. "But to say that Web 2.0 is dead?!" Nussey writes, …

Can links from unscrupulous sites hurt your site's search engine ranking? Rank Fishkin tells us "no," but adds a few caveats. Fishkin talks about the "spectrum of risk" for links and what you can do when some start to cause significant problems. For starters, he says, send a "reconsideration request" to search engines, especially Google, and explain the situation, so you are not blacklisted from rankings. Tell them you did not buy the links, or create and want them. Google, typically, carefully reviews each request and will take your thoughts into consideration.