Patricio Robles spoke with SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin about the 2009 Ranking Factors report, the dilemma of paid links, and how social media is changing SEO. So many times industry reports are written for gurus in the field, but Fishkin says the report also contains information for the novice. Aside from the technical aspects of SEO, Robles and Fishkin discuss what's ahead. For example, Fishkin says SEOs has started to see the decline of header tags--H1, H2, among others--as an important page factor. He's "bullish" that social signals, particularly links and mentions via Twitter, may rise when that …

As economic conditions slowly improve, many companies could see marketing departments distribute search budgets more evenly between organic and paid search. Louis Ventor reminds us of the old saying, "build in a recession, and reap in a boom." Ventor suggests investing in a SEO strategy and you'll "sow the seeds to dominate organic search when the recession ends." He provides suggestions on setting up a sustainable strategy and distributing funds between organic and paid search.

Anne Smarty reviews LinkExaminer, a tool that checks all one's site links. It has some useful features that SEOs may want to tap into, she writes. Smarty explains you can sort all your site pages by any of the columns, as well as export all the scanned results into a CSV file. She provides examples for both sorting and scanning.

Searching is the second most popular online activity, second only to email, according to Patricia Hursh. She thinks B2B marketers should become more concerned with getting all they can from search engines for free and forget about the SEO investment and paid search budget. So, Hursh profiles several easy-to-use tools that provide insights into customers' needs, emerging market trends, and competitive market threats. Web analytics tools are among those Hursh discusses because every year marketers spend millions of dollars on research to determine how consumers think, what they look for and their view of companies. She writes …

Michael Gray is looking for the SEO community to have better manners. He points out the damage you can cause by linking to strange things on someone's Web site or blog. Gray writes that although you don't know for sure if the something strange you see is a Wordpress hack or test, don't tweet about it, write about it on your blog, or worse, link to it. "It's the same as pointing at my crotch and telling me my zipper is down."

Narrowly focusing on one problem can lead to many more failures than you might have initially had to solve. Peter J. Meyers (aka Dr. Pete) believes the majority of SEO problems occur because people rarely consider the entire project. Pete writes that 80% of bad SEO boils down to missing the big picture -- whether trying to get every page indexed, ranking for one keyword, or obsessing over link quantity. That big picture includes the 4 Rs: Robots, Ranking, Relevance and Results. For each of the 4 Rs, Pete provides tools for measuring progress.

Aaron Wall explains the negative influence of "SEO outing" on search engine optimization, search, and online media ecosystems. Wall believes SEO outing limits media diversity, harms small businesses while corporatizing the Web, and drives down the earning potentials of many SEOs. It could eventually force many independent SEOs into low paying in-house SEO jobs, he writes. In an email to Online Media Daily, Wall writes that Google encourages public blogging about editorial infractions of competitors and submitting of spam reports to them. Complete with a large-graphic file, he outlines existing and emerging trends and how they combine to …

Marty Weintraub explains"situational" search, also known as "real-time" search for "small and big" events. These searches occur when people want information about fast-moving events, not necessarily the most important to the world, but important to someone. For example, someone may want to know why an unexpected motorcade drives through Manhattan to the Waldorf Astoria. In an experiment that taps Twitter, Google and Facebook, Weintraub details an example. He also defines barriers for Google, how real-time search engines will capitalize on this trend, and how socialization plays a role.

When budgets tighten, companies tend to want to bring SEO in-house. But do-it-yourself SEO doesn't always work. Sometimes you have to leave it to the experts if you want the job done correctly, according to Debra Northart. "Just because you can go online and create your own ad campaigns with a tool like Google AdWords, for example, doesn't mean that you should!" she writes. Northat makes her point detailing a scenario with Andy Accountant, one of her clients. She explains he had been managing his own Google AdWords campaign for about a year, but after much effort …

Reviewing some pitfalls you might want to watch for when using dynamic keyword insertion, Carrie provides insights on using the advanced feature that some major search engines offer. It lets you create more relevant ad text by automatically inserting a search query. Using it correctly can help increase relevancy and click-through rates. Use it incorrectly and the ad can become disjointed, confusing and irrelevant, she writes.