Stepping through the basics of PPC bid management, Ron Jones provides insight into manual processes, rules-based bidding, and predictive modeling. Jones believes you need to start by identifying the value of the traffic from ads, and then setting bids to a fraction of the value you're willing to pay. Analyze historic data and look closely at events that might impact the variables. For example, if sales increased during Memorial Day weekend, the holiday will impact the variables, he writes. This way you can increase your bids by X percent during the weekend and then find a norm and …

Does your site have a CAPTCHA? Chenry isn't a fan of the tool aimed at providing a wall to eliminate spam, but decided to develop a case study to clear his head and analyze how CAPTCHAs can influence Web conversion rates. The study was conducted across 50 Web sites during six months. Along with graphs and charts, CHenry recorded the successful, the failed and the spam conversions for each of the sites. The findings in this long, detailed post might surprise you.

The attributes that make up a well-designed Web page are never displayed in the page itself, according to Rick DeJarnette. Although Web pages consist of two major tags, body and header, the content of the tag and the document type declaration (DTD), which precedes the tag in the page's code, are just as important for search engine optimization (SEO), he writes. Quality body and head tag information can make a big difference in how a page gets ranked, DeJarnette writes. In a very lengthy post, he demonstrates why. He also details how to choose between HTML …

Andy Atkins-Krueger believes the world revolves around keywords and key phrases, yet no one understands them. Part of the problem, Atkins-Krueger writes, resides in the training people get from search engines, as a result of their search experience. Searcher's queries can change as they get feedback from SERPs. Unfortunately, he writes, sometimes that can confuse not only the searcher, but the marketer, too.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman, president and CEO of Rimm-Kaufman Group, passed away following a 16-month battle with leukemia, after facing countless rounds of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant in hopes of a cure, according to Elisabeth Osmeloski. Rimm-Kaufman passed on at age 41, survived by his wife, Sara, and two young children. Osmeloski writes that Rimm-Kaufman was a "valued contributor" to Search Engine Land, and points to his articles on paid search marketing and other topics.

Aaron Wall admits to being cynical toward Google. He doesn't trust authority figures, as they tend to kill many Web-based businesses that are too reliant on search. Rather than bash the company again, he decided to spend some time discussing six reasons to love Google. Those reasons include Google's free tools to improve productivity, and that fact that AdSense offers an easy baseline revenue stream. Wall writes that following Google and understanding the intent behind many of its moves can provide more insight and education than any marketing course you could take.

Keep reading if you want to know the books your favorite Google search guru recommends for summer reading, though they have nothing to do with SEO or paid search. Matt Cutts makes a list of his faves -- mostly fiction, including Josh Bazell's "Beat the Reaper," Lee Child's "Gone Tomorrow," and A. Lee Martinez's "Monster." Cutts describes "Monster's" plot as whimsical and humorous. In "Monsters," strange creatures roam the world, he writes. The story somewhat reminds him of a Terry Pratchett book. But where "Pratchett dangles the end of the world in front of readers with a …

The Web Developers Toolbar, a multi-feature add-on for the Firefox browser, offers several "cool" SEO options, according to Ann Smarty. Some of them include searching for image paths and file names, disabling JavaScript or CSS styles, and displaying image Alt attributes. Another option, researching and visualizing on-page links, lets you display URL path next to each text link, outline External links ("Outline" -> "Outline links" ->"External links"), and view the list of all page links ("Information" -> "View link information"), Smarty writes.

Not sure if you caught this last week, but Google experienced an "unhealthy downward trend" in paid search ads, according to Patricio Robles, who gives his own take on Google's earnings. He writes that data from SEM solutions provider Efficient Frontier's Customer Index confirms the 2% sequential decline Google experienced in its core paid search business is "very real." Efficient Frontier saw between 20% and 31% decline in CPCs among advertisers in its Customer Index during the second quarter of 2009, Robles writes. Google CPCs dropped 31% while CPCs on Bing and Yahoo dropped 30% and 20%, …

Tony Soric reviews two new free research tools--Google Sets, and Google Squared--to help pay-per-click marketers with keyword expansion. He writes that as competition intensifies identifying unique high-quality keywords becomes not only important, but difficult, too. Google keyword tools lets marketers identify search-volume data, and find options to build long lists, Soric writes.