Brian Carter provides a few pointers to help marketers get the most out of PPC campaigns. For one, budgeting more than you can spend does not guarantee your ad shows 100% of the time. Carter also runs down five ways to maximize PPC impressions including ad quality, accelerated ad delivery, adjusting keyword match types, adjusting regional or placement targeting parameters, and increasing the bids.

A new search engine will emerge within the next few weeks based on Stephen Wolfram's Mathematica computational software. While Wolfram bills the site as a "computational knowledge engine," Danny Sullivan calls it a "fact search engine" or an "answer search engine," a term he writes has been used in the past for services designed to provide direct answers, rather than pointing you to pages that in turn might hold the answers. In a Webinar on Friday, Wolfram provided insights into the capabilities offered by the site, which are quite detailed. Do a search on Wolfram Alpha, and if …

Scott Brinker likens the theme of "Jurassic Park" to marketing automation. In the movie, ravenous pre-historic creatures spiral out of control and devour everyone in sight. For Brinker, this is similar to the explosion of complex marketing strategies and the attempt to automate routine marketing processes. Brinker runs through several scenarios in an attempt to help marketers understand the "intersection of marketing and computer science." Technology can make marketing easier, but it won't remove the complexity of SEO, mobile marketing, behavioral targeting, among others.

John steps through the basics of setting up campaigns in Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter that let marketers target consumers based on geography. Each service, a bit different, has its strengths and weaknesses. Yahoo's geotargeting tool, for example, requires marketers to set up several campaigns if they want to target consumers outside the United States and Canada, according to John. Those looking to target other countries need to open additional accounts. John calls the tool in Microsoft's adCenter "awkward," since it doesn't offer as much flexibility as either Google or Yahoo.

SEM Geek details four "outside the box" ways to persuade clients to spend more money on PPC. That sometimes entails finding similarities between traditional and online marketing tactics to make clients feel more comfortable. For example, you can explain how investments in PPC are similar to those made in research and development; liken the strategy to television, radio and print to provide a better understanding; and make testing more affordable to promote success.

Howie Jacobson provides a humorous analogy on the dos and don'ts of setting up a landing page after visiting his local Toyota dealership. Behind the door that reads "Authorized Personnel Only," Jacobson found at least 16 mechanics' bays. He writes that the mechanics were clean, focused and calm. The lighting was great. It didn't smell like exhaust or tobacco, and one look told Jacobson why he could trust his car to them and nobody else. SEO professionals should look at landing pages similarly, carefully considering the first impressions made on site visitors. Other tips: Show visitors where to start …

Barry Schwartz encapsulates a study published by Google that goes into details on XML sitemaps. He provides a link, but for those who don't have time to download the PDF document, the post highlights the most interesting findings -- such as, there were 35 million sitemaps published as of October 2008, which include "several billion" URLs. The most popular sitemap formats include XML (77%), Unknown (17.5%), URL list (3.5%), Atom (1.6%) and RSS (0.11%). Schwartz also writes that the study details how to come up with ways to determine the crawl order, either via sitemaps or Discovery.

Yahoo has released Web Analytics for search and display advertisers. Jeff Sweat writes that the new release expands availability of the free analytics tool to all of Yahoo's account-managed advertising clients. It was originally released last October to Yahoo Small Business merchants. The tools include several upgrades. Among them are demographic reporting options that let users identify age, gender, city and online interests of site visitors. It also lets advertisers track performance of display, email and search campaigns, and produce custom reports, dashboards, alerts and segmentation tools.

The length of phrases used by those searching for info on the swine flu demonstrates the fact that SEO professionals need to look past one-to-three-word search terms into longer strings of nine or more words. This can help searchers target the exact topic they seek without having to do multiple searches. Take a look at some of the top search phrases that bring thousands of visitors to this particular Web site blog about the swine flu. One popular phrase, "how do you know if you have the swine flu," has 10 words. The most popular phrase is nine words …

Marcus Schuler tells us that Rich Skrenta, founder of Blekko, has plans to launch the search engine within three months. While initial plans don't include going head to head with Google, Skrenta does want to make sure his 200 servers located in Sunnyvale stand the first rush. He estimates the Web supports between 100 billion to a trillion pages. Nearly two years in the making, the company has raised about $5 million in equity financing with two angel rounds, including an investment from Marc Andreessen. Successful search engines can make more money than any other business on the …