If the Internet consisted of real brick and mortar buildings there would be a construction boom going on right now like the world has never seen. The Internet is not in a recession or on the road to a depression, rather it is experiencing an economic and social explosion of activity.

And Cyber Monday edges closer still. We’re at about five days now. Of course, we’ve still got Black Friday to deal with and last year shoppers spent around $531 Million online just on that day. Follow Amazon’s example and get ready for that.

Google announced a new enhancement today to the program targeting feature in AdWords for Google TV Ads. The feature now allows you to enter a keyword into the TV programs search field on the Target Campaign screen, and it will bring up suggested shows that are relevant to your keywords.

It may be the time of year at which people start counting their vacation days, but Google’s AdWords team isn’t exactly kicking off early.  The group has instead made some improvements to the month-old AdWords display ad builder and pushed the tool overseas.

Google’s been offering some great AdWords tips lately. Specifically, they recently discussed the advantages of using the broad match option and the negative keyword option. Mike McDonald also spoke with Ken Jurina of Epiar about the negative keyword option in the following interview at PubCon.

Google has introduced a new keyword tool called Search-based Keyword Tool (beta) that enables paid search advertisers to see what keywords they may be missing out on based on searches on their Web site.

As you may or may not know, Google AdWords gives you four options when it comes to keywords. If you apply the appropriate ones to your keywords, your potential for increased ROI is higher. The options you have are:

Many online advertisers continue to struggle with the decision to use either search engine advertising or display advertising. Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft AdCenter and the like, or good old fashioned banner displays. Both offer valid reasons, and each outperforms the other in different areas.

Why Not Use Both?

Gotta hand it to the Web bandits. Buying AdWords is a brazen new realm for them. A paid link leading to a dangerous malware-laden download targeted President-Elect Obama’s sweeping victory.

The ad, which according to the screenshot at security company Sophos blog achieved top placement for the keyword phrase “Obama win,” clicked out to a “rogue” site and a download prompt for an installer that is “100% checked by Antivirus.”

Happy Halloween, everyone.  As beer enthusiasts should know, this is the perfect day to enjoy a nice bottle of pumpkin ale, and thanks to a recent policy change at Google, advertisers are much more likely to point the fact out.  The search giant, you see, is now permitting beer, champagne, and wine ads.

All media is now digital. Holdouts which have not yet converted are desperately trying to figure out how to make the transition happen. As of February 2009, television signals will only be broadcast digitally; a leap necessitated by the immutable laws of physics, economics and government.

Google’s been using plusboxes in its organic results for quite some time now, but only in the last few months have we begun seeing those in paid results as well. Back in March, we first started spotting video ads in similar Google AdWords plusboxes, and now Google’s added expanded product results with images:

We’re quickly approaching the end of October. For businesses, that can only mean one thing. The holiday season is nigh! For online businesses, this means that it’s time to kick-start the tactics you should have been using all year. The clock has already begun to tick for getting people to your site and for you to cash in on online shopping for the holidays.

A lot has been made about quality scores for Google ads. Rated on a scale of 1 to 10 per keyword targeted, the quality score is the ultimate determinant of ad placement on the search results. As webmasters experiment, tips for how to achieve a perfect 10 are emerging in the forums.

Hot on the heels of the recently launched MySpace MyAds platform, which lets users easily create their own display ads to run across the social network, Google has decided to go down a similar path with its largely popular AdWords service.

Google is reportedly blocking use of it’s Chrome browser (among other applications like Google Talk and Gmail Notifier)  in some countries with which the United States has economic sanctions and export controls with. "We are unable to permit the download of Google Chrome in Cuba, Syria, North Korea, Iran, and Sudan," says a Google Spokesperson.

I am tired of so many new and old SEOs talk about linking, the importance of it and how your efforts will be wasted if you don’t embrace it. I like linking and believe it provides a good way to build credibility on the search engines, especially for new sites, but I put it last on my list. That’s right I said last. I may be old school but I have found I can cut back my dependency (time) on the number/quality of incoming links if I follow some basic principles.

Google is apparently going to disregard the investigation into any antitrust practices, and move forward in its advertising deal with Yahoo! in October, unless the government stops them.

The problem with being a dominant company comes when one treats customer service as another expense.

Updates to the AdWords API arriving on August 19 mean developers will want to make sure they don’t impact the data in their reports.

The search advertising company rolled out a new campaign type for their advertisers, one that places keyword and placement targeting in one interface.