The Ultimate Connection contest being run by Yahoo Search Marketing offers three winners a $25,000 search marketing budget, a trip to New York, and a meeting with Ivanka Trump.

Yahoo Search Marketing has been working with one of its travel advertisers, Pleasant Holidays, on an analysis of multi-channel keyword effectiveness.

According to a study conducted by Jupiter Research, sixty five percent of advertisers will increase their spending in search marketing in the coming year. Overall, advertisers are pleased with the return on investment (ROI) that they are seeing from the dollars that have been spent thus far in search.

Yahoo’s Roger Park waxed enthusiastic over Piper Jaffray’s phone book-sized report on the Internet, how it has become the mainstream medium for information, and why we need a new word to talk about it.

SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin wonders if the unsavory real world of celebrity photographers has an online equivalent in linkbaited content.

A survey by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) found that nearly everyone running a paid search campaign tosses some cash in Google’s direction.

With $9.4 billion spent on North American search engine marketing in 2006, it is easy to see why Google has remained the dominant power in SEM. If it is a given that advertisers will spend money on AdWords, no one is going to displace them from their perch.

Last week, Yahoo launched its new Panama search platform amidst much buzz throughout the blogosphere. As part of the new model, Yahoo will be implementing a scoring system to determine ad quality, which will in turn have an influence on bid prices for keywords.

We’re less than two weeks into Panama, and already Yahoo has been more forthcoming with information concerning its quality score calculation that Google was within the first two months.

If you live in the New York city area, you might be interested in a three-hour crash course in search marketing I’m teaching at the Learning Annex this Tuesday evening.

If you’re too lazy to compile your own list of the best search marketing blogs out there, never fear.

When you’ve spent the last 6-7 years of your life helping to build successful search engine optimization/marketing firms, you tend to learn a few things about what works and what doesn’t work.

Business optimization software company Omniture now offers a free guide to improving a website’s search engine marketing in seven steps.

As Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft ramp up the battle for local search dollars, retailers new to the online world need to track the effectiveness of their online advertising campaigns.

The 64-page “Essential Guide to Search Engine Marketing” features a treasure trove of articles on a range of SEM topics.

While News Corp.-owned MySpace.com courts major search engines to expand its advertising offerings through search marketing, it is also looking to expand its Australian base to better target its 800,000 Aussie members.

If you’ve not already subscribed to the newly launched Search Marketing Standard magazine, you should sign-up immediately.

Sponsored links are two to four times as likely as organic links to lead a searcher to a “risky” or “dangerous” website, according to McAfee’s Site Advisor researchers Ben Edelman and Hannah Rosenbaum. The keyword most likely to deliver those links: [free screensavers].

You’ve got until April 30th to take advantage of a free subscription to the newly launching Search Marketing Standard magazine.