Michael Gray has focused on "competitive webmastering" for the past few years. He like to start a site in a small-to-medium size niche market and strive to outrank all others in the category. Holding the top spot for a couple of niches, he shares a few secrets you can implement now to help outrank the competition. Some of the advice includes getting the same links your competition gets, making quality Web sites, and linking back to the ones making money.

For those looking for information of PageRank and how it works, tune into Darren Franks' description. He explains that too many outbound links on a Web site can deplete a site's own PageRank, but there are ways to link to relevant sites without reducing the importance of your own.

It's time to explore alternative PPC marketing opportunities other than Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, Bob tell us. (I agree.) He points to Facebook and LinkedIn as two alternative sites to place ads. Marketers also might want to consider exploring shopping engines. Bob explains why. Ignore the end of the post, though. It reeks of a marketing pitch; but the rest of the post does provide some good advice for those looking to expand paid search campaigns outside of the Big 3 search engines.

Rachel Andersen doesn't suggest stopping all search engine optimization efforts. So she explains how and why paid search and other marketing strategies can complement existing and future campaigns.Optimizing Web sites to increase traffic could require leveraging several marketing strategies. Consider testing meta descriptions, running PPC on branded keywords, managing sitelinks, using rich snippets, and tweeting strategically to tap into Google's and Bing's decision to index Twitter steams in search queries.

Bill Slawski points to a Yahoo patent application that provides some hints on deciding which link text to use in site links, also known as quicklinks. He breaks down the patent application to help us understand why Yahoo might look at several ways to select text.

Content review and keyword generation: these are among some of the seven key tasks marketers need to consider when building a new paid search campaign, according to Julie Batten. And if you're doing this for a client, don't forget to have a clear understanding of their products and services.

Meghan Keane recaps Google's privacy woes on Buzz, its social network Gmail add. She points to a post from Jesse Stay, a Blogger who yells "copyright infringement" after noticing that Buzz stripped out ads, depriving her of potential revenue rather than either displaying the ads or redirecting the reader back to her site where she can monetize views in another form. Keane also explains why other sites will run into attribution troubles, too.

Core term qualifiers, segmenting keywords, and finding the return on investment for keywords are some of the topic Stoney deGeyter explains in this guide to SEO. He also discusses four distinct keyword segments and what they represent in the searcher's buying cycle. There's also a chart that shows general rules for determining the keywords that produce the best ROI. The "happy ROI zone" includes phrases with three and four word, he writes. They bring in good traffic and have positive conversion rates.

Google China is hiring and advertisers are returning, according to Mark Lee, who provides an update on the Mountain View, Calif.'s position in the country. Six weeks after Google told the world it wanted to stop censoring its Web site in the world's largest Internet market, the company is recruiting engineers, managers and sales staff. It seems that Google's rival in China, Baidu, benefited from the threat, but Lee reports things recently took a turn.

What are the five things you should be doing as an SEO professional, but probably don't? Jen Lopez and Danny Dover discuss quick fixes for bot blocking, courting the Linkerati, identifying problems using Top Pages, analyzing conversion rate, and addressing canonicalization. And, to help visualize the strategy, they provide charts in the post the two referenced in the video.