Some marketers at the MediaPost Search Insider Summit mentioned the difficulties of keeping up with new products and services. Here's some help: Larry Kim's description of five AdWords tools released this year. Kim gives us a rundown on AdWords Campaign Experiments, AdWords Automated Rules, AdWords Call Metrics, New Product Listing Ads, and AdWords Enhanced CPC.

Matt Cutts is determined to learn a new word each day for the month of December, and he's using Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words as the source. Some of the words he picked so far include "eoan," "dorty," and "vega." Perhaps for a holiday gift someone should buy him one of those tear-off desk calendars that lists a new word each day, complete with the definition and origin.

Layoffs hit Yahoo Tuesday, sending between 600 and 700 employees out looking for new jobs during the holidays. Danny Goodwin recaps reports from other news sources re the layoffs, and provides a link to a list of startups looking for experienced workers.

Still trying to fine-tune paid search ads to attract the last-minute holiday shopper? Evidently you're not alone. So, Caleb provides tips on how to write ads and optimize landing pages. He emphasizes the need to "romanticize" ad copy to illustrate the holiday spirit. This is the time of the year to spread joy and cheer, so reflect that in your ads.

It's interesting to see how search engines might handle nicknames and formal names in query results. With the given name "William," Bill Slawski provides the perfect example to explain how a Yahoo patent application published this past week might work. The application explains how the search engine might expand queries to include nicknames for a person when a given name is used in a query, or expand a search to include a given name when a nickname is used in a query.

Eric Enge serves up advice on how to optimize Web sites in 2011 by pointing to technology advancements and changes search engines made this year, such as shifts in ranking factors, Google's May Day update and the Yahoo and Bing search alliance. Changes this year might put more pressure on publishers next year, but going into 2011 with a fresh strategy can help ease any possible mishaps.

Brent Rangen runs through a long list of keyword research tools, some of which marketers will find helpful; others simply a waste of time. Rangen tells us that even the best can't provide exact data at the perfect moment in time.

Alan Bleiweiss goes through the steps of an SEO audit. It's part of a series of articles aimed at helping newbies get more familiar with the SEO audit process. The first thing to remember: numbers don't lie. He also discusses quality rather than quantity, content vs. link heavy, and how circumstances dictate direction.

Rand Fishkin revealed new ways social media impacts traditional SEO -- and SEOmoz decided to run an informal experiment to answer questions brought on by these changes. Danny Dover explains how the test will work and puts out a call for SEOs to help carry out the experiment.

Seasoned search engine marketers know the importance of negative keywords, but newbies may need a little advice. Using negative keywords helps to qualify audiences and eliminate the risk of serving up ads to people who have no interest in the company's product or service. So, Tina Kelleher gives us some tips to keep in mind and answers a few frequently asked questions on the topic.