Rand Fishkin provides tips on better rankings for keyword + cityname combinations in cities across the country or around the world. He points to opportunities in struggles and provides tips for those optimizing local content.

Few brands take advantage of combined SEO and paid search strategies. Jason Tabeling suggests advertisers should think of how consumers interact with their search efforts and adjust campaigns accordingly. SEO and paid search should not live in silos because in the marketing funnel, one type of campaign feeds off the other. Tabeling provides tips on how to balance both.

Google's and Microsoft's content networks can cause headaches, but paid search experts should know the reporting tools to effectively manage accounts, according to Jen. She specially points to the gap in time during the ad serving transition to adCenter in mid-October, and offers up tips to ease problems during the estimated two weeks.

Cade Medtz tells us about a London-based blackhat SEO who gamed the link-exchange site Reddit by using fake accounts to boost voting on selected stories. This was the blackhat known only as Esrun, who posted a video describing a way to create fake accounts using scripts to create fake votes. The scripts allowed him to encourage votes from real users and drive links to the top of selected news category pages.

Lindsay want to know if your Web site misuses the robots.txt file. She explains how search engines treat robots.txt blocked files and invites SEO professionals to entertain themselves by reading about a few flawed implementation examples -- which could provide insight on how to avoid the same mistakes.

Here's a patent for a system and method that determines a composite score for categorized search results. A Google patent filed in 2004, and granted Tuesday, describes how the search engine may try to associate Web pages with categories, and queries with categories, before coming up with a category score for each to use as a method to rank pages for categories.

Stephen Chapman serves up some SEO tips related to link building and blog posts. It's become a challenge to find relevant non-spammy blogs to either guest post on or leave a comment. Chapman suggests starting with Google blogs. Chapman even throws in three bonus tips to help Google's bots find and identify the blog post.

Patricio Robles wonders if Google will do anything about a popular blog that directs U.S. voters searching for election information to the most disparaging articles about Republican candidates. With the upcoming election in the United States just weeks away and one political party facing major losses, the popular liberal blog Daily Kos is relying on Google to help Democratic candidates.

Kieron Hughes explains how to explore different ways to find relevant data, information and keywords about topics you're unfamiliar with. As an SEO expert, you might not know about speech therapy, but the client provides specific information that requires a hunt for related keywords. Hughes tells us the Google Adwords Keyword Tool provides suggestions.

Rand Fishkin discusses ways to get reference content indexed in the top of the search engine results page. Often this content doesn't rank well because it has a tough time earning external links, though people often search for it.