Lisa Barone, in her outspoken way, tells the tale of how Seth Godin tried out brandjacking through a program called Brand in Public. She writes that Seth "has sent his team of goblins out to register your Brands in Public company page for you, fill it with scraped content (blog posts, tweets, Google News, Trends, etc) and then lock it down so that you have absolutely no way to touch or control it." Well, that's unless you pay him, according to Barone. It turns out that about 48 hours after Barone wrote the post, Godin changed his …

A local business may perform local services, but depending on the specialty it could attract consumers from across the globe. Dennis Yu writes that when setting up paid click campaigns expect that 90% of the traffic will come from those geographically targeted campaigns, while 10% will likely come from geo-modified terms. Yu also warns to pay close attention to cities that have the same name in several states. For example, Louisville, CO versus Louisville, KY, can throw off the campaign. Also, consider if prospective clients will need to travel to see you the real estate or family …

Maybe SEO professionals should think about best practices when it comes to optimizing query results on Baidu, China's top search engine, aside from Google. Baidu CEO Robin Li took a rare visit to Silicon Valley last week to explain the rise in the company's sucess in China to a group of students that appeared more interested in entrepreneurial tips than censorship, according to Tom Krazit. Li also outlined his vision for the future of search called "box computing," which appeared to involve a "Chrome OS-style interface that would run independently of the operating system as the start …

Query mining to optimize search campaigns has been getting lots of buzz lately. So, Josh Dreller spoke with ClickEquations Founder Craig Danuloff to get the skinny on the topic. The two discuss everything from where a SEM pro can go to find search query data and good ways to organize the data, to some best practices once it has been analyzed. When Dreller asks why Danuloff hates broad match tools, he replies that these tools are typically misused, for example. No account should spend more than half their budget on broad match keywords, he says. "Adding a …

The basic concept around "living URLs" is this: An article lives at one URL and gets added to, edited and updated over time, similar to Wikipedia articles. Michael Gray took a stab at getting from first post to comments, but after putting a little more thought behind the concept came up with another idea. Although Gray warns his idea is an "experiment in progress" and shouldn't be taken as a tested and proven SEO practice, he outlines what the "living URL" might look like and how it would work. One of the goals isn't to update the …

It appears that people who search the Internet think more positively about pay-per-click (PPC) ads, compared with SEO. The Web site whatdoestheinternetthink.net can tell you how people view a particular topic simply by tying in and searching on a term or keyword. Searchcowboys.com provides a variety of examples. The difference between negative and positive was very small with the term Google--1.2% more positive than negative. Bing got a few more negative votes than positive. The site provides sentiment across Google, Yahoo, Bing and Twitter.

Most SEO experts are intimately familiar with the broken line that connects the ability to understand natural search and how organizations value it. Brian Klais writes that those who can't connect the dots or don't have the proper metrics-based business framework in place can't have the intelligent conversations required to convince executives to allocate budgets and needed resources. Klais steps through ways to improve natural search performance and provides insights on how metrics can help win the resources needed to grow your channel. He also explains ways to calculate them, tells you the metrics that matter, how …

Retargeting display ads to people searching the Web offers promising conversion rates, but Kevin Lee believes marketers should become aware of the potential pitfalls of display networks and exchanges before signing on. Demonstrating his point, Lee dissects two studies recently released, one from Mpire, and the other from Ben Edelman. Lee's doubtful that advertisers will band together to dissect the studies as he did or "demand this bill of rights" he outlines. Most are "too ignorant, lazy, or busy to complain," Although agencies don't want to make a stink unless it's on behalf of an advertiser and …

A webmaster wrote a review and linked it to related products within an article through a direct link to the affiliate. So what's the problem? It appears Google found the links, felt the site abused its paid link policy, and slapped the site with a penalty, according to Search Engine Roundtable. Nofollows, as they relate to Google and affiliates, have become a topic generate a lot of buzz lately. Some believe affiliate links can get a site into hot water. The string of comments connected to the post provides insights on the proper protocol and Google rules. …

If you want to discover what pages are linked to a Web site, you'll be interested in a tool Mike Tekula details from SEOmoz called Top Pages. He explains that you give it a domain and it returns a list of the pages at that domain linked to by the most root domains, sorted highest to lowest. To demonstrate how it works, he turns the tool back on SEOmoz.org. Tekula provides an example of a "link-attracting blog" that draws insight from style, content and topics. His tips and tricks are meant as a takeaway for those looking …