In a "Whiteboard Friday" video, Ben Hendrickson and Rand Fishkin discuss the type of data that supports SEO best practice guidelines. They also suggest where to find the data, how to collect it, and how to use it to determine the correlation between rankings and title tags, among other attributes. The two look at the attributes and features that high-ranking sites tend to have in common, providing insight into how the algorithms are changing and how certain factors influence the outcome.

In the battle for "SERP supremacy," where wouldn't you want to control back links? Many times SEO experts may just want to give "authority" to the main site, rather than supporting micro or niche sites. Alan Bleiweiss describes what can happen when you drive niche sites higher than the main site, and the types of SERP problems you can encounter in the process. But Bleiweiss warns his methods may scrape the edge of the gray-hat world, but that's because it's all about winning the SERP wars. He steps through the process and describes the challenges of setting up …

Halfway through the year and Mike has already begun to put together his holiday wish list. But rather than writing to Santa, he addresses the major paid search engines. He writes that if the engines granted just half the list by year's end, PPC advertisers would have a very merry holiday season. For example, Mike asks Yahoo for a campaign management program similar to Adwords Editor. He writes Yahoo still hasn't bothered to create a stand-alone campaign management tool similar to AdWords Editor or adCenter Desktop that helps to manage a paid advertising campaign.

Kevin Lee suggests brands are missing an opportunity to advertise on Microsoft's new search engine Bing. He writes that the level of competition in adCenter is lower than Google because fewer marketers have opened accounts. But click quality on Microsoft's search properties is "very good because it's virtually undiluted by syndication partners that can cause divergence in click quality and predictability of conversion." Advertisers realize Microsoft has put a strong focus on commercial searches. It's evident by the development and integration into the search navigation of specific industry segments, such as travel. He calls attention to the nuances …

Marketers need to pay more attention to the keywords they use in PPC campaigns because some don't realize how many trademark names actually end up in ads, according to George Michie. He calls these trademarks "ticking time bombs" that could ruin PPC campaigns. As an example, he provides an eight-sentence paragraph that includes 15 trademarks often used. The problem is that a computer program often generates the list of keywords. Paid search managers may generate tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of keywords for search engines. This is done without a lawyer or any human looking at the …

Yahoo released a new display advertising platform Monday. Amber writes that the biggest change is it doesn't connect to your Yahoo sponsored search account. Unlike similar platforms, you don't need a Yahoo account to advertise via display ads, she explains. For the most part, Amber gives the new platform a thumbs-up. She points to one negative feature when it comes to determining the budget for the ad. While Yahoo offers two pricing models, one for cost per click, and the other cost per impression, the platform assigned her a cost model, rather than gave her a choice, for …

PageRank has recently surfaced as a hot topic. Bas van den Beld looks at PageRank for Bing on Google's search engine. He writes that "Not only is the leap from a PR2 to a PR9 pretty high, it's also remarkable that a site which might be Google's biggest competitor in the next coming years gets such a high PR from their main rival." It appears Google has been updating PageRank much more often these days, compared with the past, according to van den Beld. He points to speculation around Google's experiment with real-time search -- and notes that …

The price companies pay for SEO services could depend on the consultant's business model and geographic location. Honest consultants will focus on return on investment, not guarantee results, and should charge more than $300 monthly for services. That's according to Matt McGee, who lays out five points to help small and medium-sized businesses put costs for SEO services in perspective. McGee aims to debunk the idea that SEO services "shouldn't cost much more than your satellite/cable TV bill." He wants companies to have a realistic view of the work and the time it takes for each project. …

The Google Cache presents a new method for getting Google to respider orphaned pages when performing URL rewrites across a Web site. Several examples in the post provide "advanced white SEO" tactics to help set up pages so Googlebots can spot corrected URLs. The instructions step through using XML sitemaps to coax the bots to revisit the old pages more rapidly, lessening the likelihood of duplicate content. A critical time for a site's rankings occurs during shifts in URL structures across the site. While creating canonical URLs is easy, similar to mapping old URLs to new with 301 …

It's wise to think ahead when optimizing a site with keywords, but often the future is difficult to predict. Spotting trends is somewhat easier because they tend to follow a predictable pattern, especially when using Google Trends, according to Peter DaVanzo. DaVanzo calls Google Trends a useful tool for predicting interest, rise or fall, in keywords. Another tool, Google Insights For Search, lets you drill down into the data by date, region, category and source. Also check out Twist and Twitter's search tool for spotting trends.