The New York Post’s been a bit down on giving Google money for paid search lately. It may not be surprising to you that the NYP might be a little one-sided on this issue, even unnecessarily snarky, but there is, at least, an interesting concept presented: buying sites with good natural rankings to avoid AdWords altogether.

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. 

Bringing SEO In house is quickly becoming one of the hottest topics across the Industry. With businesses looking to cut down on marketing budgets and wanting to expand on preexisting In House teams it will be difficult for traditional SEM Firms to continually offer the same services (at the same premiums) as they have been in the past. Businesses are looking to strengthen their relationships with their online marketing departments and what better way to do this then removing the 3rd Party SEM firm out of the picture.

What so many companies are searching for is the next big advance in search engine marketing (SEM), which promotes web sites by increasing their visibility in the search engine results pages.

Searches for beach information have spiked, according to Yahoo, just in time for the start of summer. Searchers are even looking for beaches in Indiana.

For a long time, search engine marketers wondered why the big brands were so slow to adopt, why they seemed to be ignoring Google. They may be wishing for the old days, when smaller players with smaller budgets had a better shot at the SERPs.

Headlines are tricky – especially when writing for the Web. You want to be search engine friendly, but at the same time, you don’t want to readers (or potential readers) to skim over the headline like it’s part of a technical manual.

On the surface this seems a little shady – at worst, it’s evil genius at work; at best, it’s a great tip for the powers of good, legitimate SEO operations. Joe Whyte, over at HybridSEM, recommends taking advantage of .edu job boards to boost your website’s ranking in the search results.

“The Best Way To Get Link Love From .edu”

At the end of the day, it’s about sales, not traffic. And if it’s about sales, then it must also be about people, not clicks. This seemed to be the focus of yesterday’s one-day SEW Live in Columbus, OH (you might call it SES Lite), as marketers explore the transition from search engine marketing to social media marketing.

Coming off a successful debut of their Fundamentals of Search Marketing course, the training arm of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization has its Advanced SEO class up and running.

The e-business world is moving on from SEO and SEM. That doesn’t mean they aren’t important. It means that everybody seems to get it now (perhaps) and it’s sort of a standard practice, like tacking fliers to light posts. The next frontier has two branches: branding and making connections.

Where it’s not going: direct marketing (been there, done that for a decade now); single-channel.

I was able to do just two video interviews before my camera got dropped in a glass of water. I’ll have to explain that in another post.