Small businesses looking to save time and money may want to consider combining pay-per-click and SEO projects. Rather than building a PPC-only landing page, spend the time creating a great page of content that delivers nice conversions and a good click-through rate and quality score for paid ads, suggests Carrie Hill. "Many successful marketers will tell you they use PPC campaign to fine tune the keywords they've found before implementing" them in SEO projects, Hill writes. Among the tips to get the most from scaled-back marketing budgets, she recommends building a quality page full of content for one term …

Hackers are redirecting search engine crawlers to different sites, according to John Mueller, who provides details on the dirty deed. Doing this gives search engines and Web surfers the impression the Web site has moved to a new domain name. "When search engines find redirects like that, they will more or less pass the 'value' that a page had on to the new URL--that generally also applies to PageRank," he writes. Take note of the site hijacking the PageRanks and the warning signs that Mueller provides in this post. Among them, the search error message "URLs from the …

Nathan Buggia provides a few possible ways to track the source of clicks or requests. One is to track parameters in URLs, but that sometimes results in "significant issues with search engines," which he explains in the post. For instance, he believes it can cause duplicate content issues when a search engine bot finds multiple valid URLs that point to the same page. It can cause ranking issues if all page links aren't for the same URL. Robots.txt is one relatively simple solution to ensure search engines are not indexing URLs that contain tracking parameters, he adds.

SEMI shares the results of the first four surveys from its SEM Pro Survey Series. Compiled results from 254 participants from five countries provide insight into PageRank, NoODP and NoYDIR tags, analytics programs most used, and more. About 64% of the respondents practice both SEO and PPC; 27% practice SEO, and 8% specialize in PPC. For example, when search marketers were asked if onpage, offpage or "other" elements are the most influential in regards to ranking, 48% cited backlinks, and 38% cited onpage elements. When respondents were asked their thoughts on PageRank, 39% of marketers said it's overrated, …

SEOmozBlog rolled out a Firefox toolbar Monday that Danny Dover affectionately calls mozBar. The toolbar reveals link metrics accessible through Linkscape reports, and offers quick access to SEOmoz tools and other sections on the Web site. The toolbar lets PRO members see mozRank, mozTrust, Domain mozRank, Domain mozTrust, Google PageRank and the number of external links for any URL they visit, Dover writes. Dover also details the mozBar privacy policy and the system requirements in his post.

SEO "code injection or poisoning" became the new IT security threat in 2008, according to Kris Lovejoy. The director of IBM's security, governance and risk management division, Lovejoy notes that this factor affected around 1.2 million Web sites, including some "very high-profile" ones. Destructive code from a variety of sources can attach to composite applications, such as SOA or Web 2.0 widgets and mash-ups. Lovejoy suggests after the "dust settled from this exceptionally destructive threat," it became clear these types of applications had become "ground zero for hacker attacks."

Do you need help gaining higher ROI for your investment in pay-per-click campaigns? Brian Carter serves up tips and tricks on PPC "Budget Awesomization" you many want to consider. Before jumping into the details, Carter defines the term and tries to make the concept easier to understand by comparing the process to managing financial investments. Carter also provides an example of a PPC project he worked on while at Fuel Interactive. He also steps through ways to prepare account structures to optimize budgets and maximize returns, addresses problems of underperforming pages and sites, and suggests ways to circumvent …

Aaron Wall asks if SEO is worth the cost and effort of learning the process and implementing a strategy, and answers the question with an informal case study of helping two friends build and optimize separate Web sites. While one didn't take the concept of SEO to heart, the other did. Wall analyzes the optimization roadmap of both sites. "One site was mapped out against the search traffic, has targeted descriptive page titles, and uses well structured categories," he writes. "The other does not." Although he believes "inside of a year the site that employs SEO will out-perform …

Raise your hand if you use Twitter as a SEO marketing tool! Following tweets on Twitter has become an obsession for some and obstacle for others. Should you "follow back" a person who chooses to follow you first? That depends, suggest Simon Owens. In this post he discusses the new social dilemma -- to friend or not to friend. "This is a decision that millions of social media users make sometimes several times a day; in a world where a Facebook friend request costs nothing more than a single click, the 'friend economy' faces an overabundance of friend …

Search engine rankings may take bounce rates into consideration, according to Eric Enge. Among other definitions, Google Analytics defines a bounce as when site visitors view one page on a Web site and either click on a link to a page on a different site, close an open window or tab, type a new URL, click the "back" button to leave the site, or don't do anything and lets the session time out. There are other definitions, of course, but questions and hypothesis discussed in the post support Enge's view on a new study from SEO Black Hat …