While link building is among the toughest SEO challenges for small businesses that support ecommerce features, it's also one of the most popular, according to Rob Ousbey. He offers up some advice for those working on projects for small businesses, either in-house or at an agency. The tips range from adding product reviews and non-commercial content, to asking business associates and industry friends to link to your site. Ousbey provides details on each, suggesting the addition of content that offers up advice on products and services specific to your site.

Aaron Wall notes that Fox News's Web site has derogatory commentary about SEO professionals. It calls SEO experts "e-mail spammers ... or Web site spammers ... or a search engine optimizer ... who clog the Internet with unwanted ads and sell users' personal information to the highest bidder." Wall calls the example "idiotic" because it appears on a "domain lander page," not a site that relies on SEO practices. "Worse yet, the site consists of nothing but an ad feed from one of the search engines, so if that site is spam then so must be the …

Link spam has become a more vexing issue for search engines, basically because it's difficult to detect and there's no clear definition, according to Tom Pick. Pick writes that for Web site owners, link spam represents emails requesting the recipient list the inquirer's site on their Web site. He explains that the challenge for search engines is they aren't privy to these emails. And in a link spam campaign, links from various sites with a mix of one-way, three-way and reciprocal, is often indistinguishable from a reputable link-building program.

Find a good URL, configure your default tab, generate links to your page, and use Facebook for inbound links to your company's Web site. These are a few of the seven tips Nick O'Neill lays out to help optimize profiles and content on Facebook. Most of the tips are basic steps to increase the amount of traffic driven to Facebook public profile pages, but O'Neill also provides a few details the intermediate marketing expert may not know.

The Apple App iTunes store began selling an iPhone application a few weeks ago that manages Google AdWords campaigns, according to Search Engine Roundtable. Webdeys.com developed the app, dubbed PPC Editor. PPC Editor sells for $16.99, and enables AdWords advertisers to manage campaigns on the go. Although not created by Google, it relies on Google's API to pull data from AdWords campaigns. Search Engine Roundtable believes Google is working on a mobile AdWords interface that will run on iPhone, Android, Pre, and other smart phones.

Not setting and measuring campaign goals, focusing on traffic rather than conversions, and failing to separate content and search campaigns. These are three of the seven common mistakes newbies to PPC advertising make that cause campaigns to fail, according to Brad Geddes. Geddes explains how to avoid these problems. For example, don't ignore match types, he writes. Google uses "broad match" by default to trigger results for a search query. If you consider "tea" as a similar term to "coffee," and "cups" similar to "mugs," it might explain how someone searching on "coffee mug" might see the keyword …

Dave Harry interviews Tobias Peggs about real-time search, which Peggs defines as searching on a topic and getting the "right results for right now." So, if you're searching on the word "Iran," the "right results" would include news through still photos, videos and blogs that provide information on events happening at the moment. When asked to list the networks OneRiot crawls and monitors, Peggs points to Twitter and Digg, along with several others he's "unable to disclose." OneRiot also indexes Compete.com and other Internet measuring services that have opted in to share information in real time.

"With the recent update from Google on how they handle the nofollow'ed links, many SEOs had to revisit if they would continue to use them or not," according to Search Engine Roundtable. So the site developed a poll of SEOs and Webmasters on that topic. With roughly 300 readers responding, 38% who took the poll admit they will keep nofollows on their links, followed by 22% who don't know yet; 21% say they will remove most nofollows. You will have to read the post to know the rest of the percentages.

Google reported adding a few features in its Google Insights for Search keyword tool. Hal Varian writes the tool is available in 39 languages worldwide. Google also introduced a forecasting feature that provides information on the popularity of keywords based on historical trends and search pattern. Google Insights for Search can pinpoint the keyword terms people search on, where they search, and when they search. The tool identifies the most recent rising searches, which in turn can assist marketers to choose frequently searched-for keywords.

Alessandro Catorcini and Rick DeJarnette provide instructions on getting the Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) SEO toolkit up and running, including insight on the minimum installation requirements. The tool works as an extension of the latest version of IIS, ver. 7. Catorcini and DeJarnette explain you'll need to download the version of the toolkit that works with the type of Windows you run. And if you're not sure if it's Windows 32-bit or 64-bit, the two provide directions on how to check.