Search Engine Watch reported that Microsoft has added Search Engine Marketing to the services Office Live businesses can use to help grow their websites.

As a site owner, it’s important to devote what link building time you have to creating connections that count – really count – as far as search engine spiders are concerned.

In fact, there’s a range of site link types – links diversity. Some are more valuable than others. Spend your time and resources building the highest quality links and you’ll quickly see the value of these efforts.

Hosted Content

Experienced client side and agency search marketers know that today’s SMB and enterprise SEO projects involve much more than single event “SEO triage” and link building.

Back in February, AKQA sold a majority stake in itself.  Now the checkbook’s in the other hand, so to speak, as AKQA has acquired SearchRev, a search marketing firm.

Organic search engine optimization, until recently, had been a fairly straightforward endeavor. The goal was to optimize the content on a website so that it would show up in the organic results on one or more of the major search engines – results that were comprised of nothing but other websites.

Okay people, enough is enough.  I can’t go through a day anymore without reading some article or other about how Google has been seduced by the power of the dark side.  It’s debunking time. 

Robert Scoble and Matt Cutts have two of the most recognizable names in the search engine industry.  So when Scoble does an interview that gives “[a] look into Search Engine Marketing,” and Cutts compliments him on it, the 20-minute piece may well be worth a look.

Recently I’ve read about otherwise sane Internet Marketers (also called SEO’s) targeting Digg comments at an attempt to direct traffic to a particular website. The first thing that came to mind was that running a campaign specifically to garner traffic from the comments of a techie social media site is probably not going to have a great ROI. I may be wrong, depending on your target market, but nonetheless blog posts abound SEO’s spending lots of time on ineffective strategies abound.

At Social Media Systems we’ve been discussing how to build out a healthy blogroll, both to aid our visitors, provide valuable content, and to enhance our social media marketing campaigns.

Segregating your traffic by geographical location is a useful thing and is known in the search engine marketing circles as “geotracking”, but you could go one step further and target specific traffic based on geographical location using the cryptic practise known as “geotargeting”. But what happens when it’s used to block access to users based on their geography?

There’s a lot more to search engine marketing than examining the pros and cons of all the hot new Google AdWords services. 

In my last article I wrote about how search marketing is currently like a giant popularity contest. This begs the question of what’s going to come next as Google’s and the other engines’ algorithms keep evolving and take into account more and more data. What will this mean for search marketers?

Currently, search engine marketing is best described by the phrase “popular.” This may change in the future, but right now, to rank in a competitive search term, you have to be popular; you know, like way back in high school where there was a division between the “cool kids” and everyone else.

If you don’t know who Seth Godin is, you probably don’t read a lot of marketing blogs or marketing books. He’s authored about a dozen, including my personal favorite entitled “All Marketers Are Liars.” He’s spoken at Google and his blog was recently listed as the number 1 marketing blog in the world.

Ok, enough with his bio; one of his recent posts greatly disappointed me, because he apparently doesn’t understand SEO. After looking deeply at his blog, I was horrified to discover some major downfalls. So I’m going to make some claims, show some evidence and put forth a logical case against his view point and I’m even going to slam his article on SEO as naïve, ill-contrived and most importantly, encouraging of a very expensive mistake for business owners. I’ve got nothing personally against him, but when someone that public publishes something so ignorant concerning a large part of my profession, it warrants a strong response.

There’s been a lot of soul-searching that’s been going on in the world of SEM lately and it’s good for everybody. Some of this introspection has doubtless been stimulated by the comments of my boss, Dave Pasternack, when he noted that "SEO is Not Rocket Science," but as pointed out by others, including Danny Sullivan and Gord Hotchkiss, both the SEO and Paid Search components of what we call SEM are on the cusp of a paradigm change.

There are things Search Ad Network will and won’t do when it comes to search engine marketing, but it’s what the prospective client should do that will put them ahead of the competition from the start.