When you think of search marketing, most of us consider conversions as the true metric of success, driving actual leads and sales through the web site. However, in a recent Radar Research Study, over 62 percent of executive respondents said that building brand awareness was their top objective. Online marketing and brand building are not mutually exclusive ideas.

In the latest Business Week, buried on page 70, there's a story about outsourcing in search marketing. The story is titled "Life on the Web's Factory Floor," and it's about the thriving business in assembling search marketing ads. From the description, it sounds like search marketing is nothing more than a big Scrabble game....

Last month I penned an article discussing the notion that keywords alone as a marketing vehicle are setting marketers up for failure. Keywords are simply how consumers express themselves, and we speak to consumers--not to keywords. So, what does this really mean?

Thanks to a range of business intelligence tools both freely and commercially available, we have countless ways to examine what people are searching for. Historically, what has been harder to document is the process of how people search. A growing body of research sheds light on this subject, and these studies give marketers a roadmap for what they can learn about their customers

With SEM maturing into a full-fledged industry, I think it's time we began a conversation on managing the search workforce in our new era. Much more than offering jobs alone, we need to invest in our employees' careers: we need to help them navigate from where they are now--be they newbies or veterans--to where their role in search can take them next.

A few months ago, I found out that my name was on a petition going around Boston--a petition that I hadn't actually signed myself....

Last week, I had the chance to spend some time talking to Ask's new CEO, Jim Lanzone. The first thing that become very clear is that Lanzone is tired of his company's being compared to Google, MSN and Yahoo....

There has been a lot of buzz about RPA's very cute campaign for the Honda Element. Search was used, along with television and a Web site to encourage viewers to interact with a group of adorable critters that included a possum, a platypus, a talking crab and a lizard....

If Google Co-Op, Yahoo My Web, and other such developments from the search engines continue to emerge and grow in prominence, then the search engines and their hundreds of millions of users will soon find themselves subjugating to a new ruling class: the Aristocracy of Relevance.

Yahoo Chairman and CEO Terry Semel, recently quoted in the Financial Times of London, had a bit of friendly business advice for search-giant hopeful Microsoft. The Financial Times quote reads: "My impartial advice to Microsoft is that you have no chance. The search business has been formed." I'd like to disagree.