by Mack CollierMore businesses than ever are exploring the possibility of using socialmedia tools and sites to help grow their business. But many of theseefforts aren't very effective, and I think that is due to manybusinesses simply misunderstanding what social media is, and why it'sso important.

First, what exactly IS social media? Asking 10 people might result in 10 different answers, but for simplicity sake, lets say that social media is a group of tools and sites that let you easily create and share content online. Blogs, social networks, and podcasts are the common forms of social media that most of us are at least somewhat familiar with.

The problem that I think many businesses have, is how they view social media. I believe many businesses (of all sizes) see...

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by Stoney deGeyter

As the debate over paid links continues to wage a lot of innocent business owners get caught in the crossfire. They often hear bits and pieces of information and then have to make decisions based on that information. Rarely is the average business owner as fully informed as the average SEO. Heck, even the average SEO is in the dark much of the time trying to parse statements and warnings made by the search engine representatives.

One of the areas of confusion that many have regarding paid links is knowing when a paid link is really a paid link, and when is a paid link penalized. I think a fair argument can be that a payment doesn't necessarily always have to be monetary. Any quid pro quo on a link can legitimately be considered a "paid" link.

But not to...

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by Mike Moran

Is search marketing old enough to have a good old days? If it is, then I remember them. Ah, the days when you could fire up the Overture keyword tool to see how many searches were done in the U.S. on Yahoo! for a particular keyword. Add a little math, and you could estimate the number of searches done across all U.S. search engines in a month. But then Yahoo! crippled that free tool, and we've been left with no way to project keyword demand, until now.

Bill Hunt, my co-author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc. worked with his team at Global Strategies International to estimate keywords using Google's free keyword tool. The good news is that this technique allows you to estimate keyword demand for any country where Google is used, not just the U.S., but the bad news...

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