As John Battelle reports, Mazda’s off to the races buying terms like “Pontiac” for its AdWords campaign.

It’s time to say a few words about why the government’s request for search query data bothers me. As he so often does, Danny summarizes a controversy nicely.

At Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Strategies keynote speech he lamented that the industry is so fragmented.

Title tags are SEO through name calling.

News from Nathan Enns.

Some keyword prices are seasonal, showing a sharp increase around the holidays. Zoom in on that holiday timeline and we find some seasonal keywords are more seasonal than others. Some category prices increase before Christmas, some after, and others hold strong the entire season.

Whether and SEM pro or not, the AdWords Learning Center may be some help. From tutorials on optimization to lessons on local targeting, the Google webpage can help even the best search marketers bone up and reinforce their skills.

On his blog, Niall Kennedy shows us how to create custom Technorati charts.

Everybody’s talking about this guy today, so I figured I’d better get on the bandwagon. Search Marketer Chris Zaharius, who runs Efficient Frontier, has a weblog with several nifty quick tips and creative advertising suggestions. The most recent post involves setting up AdWords campaigns that target reputation management, use poetry, or set up an advertising scavenger hunt.

Search engine advertising saw a small drop in year-over-year prices from October 2004 to this October, with a new average price of $1.45 for keyword ads.

Google AdWords clients are now offered a new keyword suggestion tool though their AdWords account. They’ve added some nice comparison tweaks to make the updated tool more user friendly and efficient.

CompetitorKeywords.com bills itself as a powerful new tool for finding out what terms competitors are using for search marketing.

This hands on PHP Programming article provides the knowledge necessary to design and develop a search engine for your website using PHP version 4.0 and above.

Another month, another drop, as the average cost-per-click for paid search terms decreased from August to September.

So you’ve translated your website into German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, French, Arabic, Portuguese and Chinese. Now what?

Keyword research is the single most important aspect of any search optimization and promotion campaign, without exception. The keyword research process brings to light information that is both beneficial and directly applicable to many aspects of the business.

Not to beat a dead horse or anything, as this horse seems to have been killed years ago, but the meta keyword tag debate still snorts and flaps its tail from time to time, meaning we’ll need to whap it at least once more.

Back in 1997 I did some research in an attempt to reverse-engineer algorithms used by search engines. In that year, the big ones included AltaVista, Webcralwer, Lycos, Infoseek, and a few others.

Quality counts the most when composing an ad, as one AdWords user found when logging into the ad system today.

Google told Adwords customers today they were dickering with the prices. WebMasterWorld had the skinny with their AdWords Advisor giving much of the low down. When people logged onto their Adwords today, they got a new message.

Sometimes, researching for profitable keywords for Search Engine Optimization can lead to some astonishing and unusual surprises.