If you're sitting there scratching your head wondering about the best use for Twitter, Tessa Wegert serves up details on a couple of success stories. I'm the first to admit that I didn't get Twitter at first, but the post provides details on campaigns for @Zappos and @WholeFoods to aid in the discovery. Wegart writes about the CEO who brings consumers into his life: Zappos' CEO Tony Hsieh, who shares intimate moment with Twitter followers. If "not for his occasional talk of celebrity-filled parties and television appearances, you'd think he was an average guy," she writes. And …

Analytics tools, reports, forecasting tools, and campaign tune-up to analyze and generate a proposal are Kastel Waserman's picks for the essential Yahoo tools that marketers should have in their strategy toolbox. For instance, the reporting tool lets marketers compare ad, landing page and keyword performance. Waserman explains it can help identify trends you might want to repeat. The app lets marketers set parameters, so it runs, saves and emails the report automatically.

A sitemap provides search engines with the URLs, but SEO experts and Webmasters also need to provide a crawlable navigation scheme to leverage the power of internal anchor text on Web sites. Michael Gray tells us without that anchor text it becomes more difficult for search engines to understand what's on the page. The new canonical tag has the ability to identify identical pages, but Gray believes site owners need to start thinking more about structure. Make it "naturally crawlable," he writes. He reminds us that "tools like sitemaps and canonical tags should supplement, but never replace or …

Google rolled out an expandable advertising format this week that lets marketers put more information into ads. Arnold Zafra summarizes the features based, in part, on information at an Google AdSense blog post. The advertisements expand after someone clicks or interacts with them such as a rolling or mousing over the ad. The expandable ad feature is available to AdSense users in North America and Europe. Marketers need to enable the image ads feature in their AdSense account. "Earnings for these expandable ads can either be on a CPC or CPM basis," Zafra writes. "CPC revenues apply for …

Adding social features on your Web site could help you gain higher returns from AdWords campaigns. "When you pay for people to click on your ad, you probably want them to spend time on your site and hopefully return to your site," writes Christian Yee. "One way to make your advertising dollar go further by keeping visitors on your site is to add social features with Google Friend Connect." Pasting a few snippets of code on your Web site lets you add comments, ratings, and friend invitations from gadgets created by Google and the OpenSocial developer community. …

Repetitive keyword targeting, splitting efforts across many domains, reciprocal linking, keyword stuffing, and avoiding XML sitemaps are some of the 12 mistakes that SEO newcomers make, according to Rand Fishkin. Hecan see the "struggles and misconceptions that affect entrants" into the field. For instance, of No. 9 on the list, ignoring non-Google search sngines, he writes, "Why limit yourself to Google!? Just because they're the market leader doesn't mean that another 15-20% of search traffic from Yahoo!, MSN & Ask isn't worthwhile. Most people salivate at boosting SEO 15-20% but continue to ignore the other engines. As a …

Online marketers who need help with turning Web site viewers into purchasers might want to take a look at Aaron Wall's interview with Ben and Karl from Conversion Rate Experts. Conversion Rate Experts helped Wall grow the conversion rate on his site by 124%. The interview contains tips on getting to know your customers better, keeping messages on your Web consistent, correcting the target audience after you have found you have missed the mark, finding the pages on the site that bring in the most conversions, and improving the pages or parts of the Web site that don't …

Big brands appear to be ranking higher in search engine results on Google. Once again, this topic ignites the debate on whether Google has changed its algorithms to give larger brands an advantage over the little guys, according to ArcherSEM.com. Aaron Wall also recently hashed out the debate at SEOBook.com. Some theorize that major brands'relevancy targeting has improved. "One of the most obvious apparent shifts with this algorithm update will be an emphasis in search saturation and off page branding [that's] possibly measured through Google's PPC engine AdWords with specific connections to their audio and TV ads," …

While Jessica Bowman believes not everyone has the aptitude to become a search engine optimization (SEO) expert, she tells us how someone lacking in the experience and the skills can get the job done. Bowman believes large companies have the most opportunities to deploy a successful SEO strategy, but typically have the most headaches trying to implement it. Among her recommendations: "You document the process to the Nth degree so that anyone can do it, and tell them how long it would take"; using an outside search expert for limited back-up. It's no secret tight budgets have forced more companies …

Asking for more links without getting greedy might be a sensitive subject, but Gyutae Park provides marketers and SEO experts with dos and don'ts to consider. He also serves up insight on optimizing link anchor text, correcting errors, changing link locations, and turning your site name references into valuable links. Park also provides links to Google Webmaster, SEO Spyglass and Link Diagnosis, Web tools that can help you optimize your site.