Optimizing your site for search engines can be challenging and time consuming. It’s a game where the rules are always changing and there is no shortage of outdated and just flat out bad advice readily available. So, what should you be doing? How should you be approaching the whole search engine optimization mess?

Click Forensics has released its pay-per-click (PPC) fraud numbers for the third quarter of 2007.

First the good news. Pay per click, as it has been perfected by Google, is unarguably the Web’s highest business achievement to date. Google has become an international corporate icon worth more than some of the most famous name brands of our generation like Disney, McDonalds and Hertz.

Making recent headlines has been a heated debate between a click fraud auditing vendor, Tom Cuthbert of Click Forensics, and Shuman Ghosemajumder, head of click quality at Google.

Just as the commotion died down over Microsoft’s Live Search update, Yahoo comes forward with some thunder of its own, unveiling its new Search Assist feature, an interface also focused more on user intent (the new buzz word in search, apparently), with a healthy dose of user-generated content thrown in for good measure.