If you do a vanity search on your name in Google, you may be surprised at the amount of information returned, both positive and negative. Google's Susan Moskwa offers reputation management advice, providing tips on burying content you dislike in search engine queries if the site that published the information won't remove it for you. The most important point Moskwa makes is to "proactively" publish useful and positive information about yourself or your business. If you can get positive information to outperform the content on search engines that you don't want people to see, you can reduce the …

Ron Jones thinks marketers should become aware of Internet laws and trademark policies before branding a business or launching a SEM campaign. There's a lot to consider, including steering clear of a company's trademark rights. Jones steps through the actions to take if a competitor uses your trademark in a "blatant attempt to profit from online and search traffic." Among the points he covers are common law trademarks, trademark registration, and new Federal Trade Commission guidelines for endorsements and testimonials.

Many consumers who buy clothes, electronics, music and other stuff on the Internet look for vouchers or promotion codes to save money on purchases. Tom Critchlow believes this is another opportunity to rank in the search engines. He provides ideas on ways to offer a promo/voucher code, such as through email newsletters, and steps through the process of creating a page to offer the codes. He also calls out some big-box brands who don't take advantage of this strategy.

After launching a SEM campaign in three countries in eight days, Roth shares what went wrong and right. For starters, don't think "going global with SEM" means that the same U.S. strategy will work in Europe -- that only can get marketers into trouble, Roth writes. He also considers such questions as whether to outsource or not.

Bill Slawski tells us about a Google patent that "discusses how trust rank might be associated with people who apply labels to web pages through annotations." He calls the use of annotations "interesting," pointing to Google's recent release of Sidewiki, though "there's no sign from Google that Sidewiki and the user trust system in this patent are related," he writes. Slawski discusses how the idea behind trust rank could influence other projects. "The patent itself goes into some detail on how information from annotations and labels from experts might be used by the search engine to re-order …

Kevin Lee provides help with cutting "through the hype" to figure out what retargeting program to use. "Most importantly, you need to know when two retargeting programs are incompatible with each other (meaning you may have to pick one vendor with whom to work)," he writes. He provides a primer on the three kinds of retargeting programs: search visitor recapture, targeting-driven, and publisher-driven. He also suggests starting with a strategy that lets you target search visitors to your site first. Existing customers and those who visit your site have a stronger tie-in to your brand than others.

It takes more than analyzing logs to identify the words that bring in the most traffic and conversions, according to Mike Moran. Rather then only focus on the keywords that bring in traffic, think about those that have potential. Moran gives us a three-part checklist to help find hidden keywords.

Zachary Seward tells us how The Huffington Post tried real-time A/B testing to pick one of two possible headlines for various stories. He writes that HP's Chief Technology Officer, Paul Berryspoke, briefly about this topic earlier this month while on a panel at the Online News Association conference in San Francisco, but wouldn't elaborate much in a one-on-one discussion following the session. A/B testing isn't the only way to gain the popular vote. Seward writes HP editor Josh Young also has been crowdsourcing headlines on Twitter.

Jump to 11:45 in the following podcast to hear Virginia Nussey's interview ClickEquations's Craig Danuloff, who shares tactics on a query-based approach to PPC, along with insights on search campaigns, and a synergistic approach to SEO and PPC. Danuloff talks about the PPC buying cycle.

In a very long post, Avinash Kauskik demonstrates how to measure the success of government Web sites, using www.belgium.be as an example. Kauskik admits optimizing government sites can be a "bit more complicated," but puts together a checklist to ensure satisfaction ratings remain high. Kauskik suggests outbound link tracking, as well as knowing the length of time it takes for someone to find key information on the site.