Fathom SEO, a Search Engine Marketing Firm in Cleveland, Ohio, has just released a “Paid Search Best Practices” guide from Fathom SEO. The guide offers ten tips – from setting up tracking and testing variable landing pages and everything in between – that can help search engine marketers maximize their paid search budgets.

You can find the guide at http://www.fathomseo.com/paid-search-best-practices/10paidsearchtips.pdf. Please note there is also a corresponding informational video that helps further explain the guide. That video is located on Fathom SEO’s site at http://www.fathomseo.com/paid-search-best-practices/.

On Thursday, September 13, Xeal president Tony D. Baker will evaluate a variety of websites and offer marketing tips that can dramatically impact your business.

Get expert advice on:
- Design techniques and mistakes
- Improving your rankings
- Increasing conversions
- Drawing customers to your website

Learn this and more during the Webinar. Get website tips live Thursday, September 13 at 6:00 CST. To sign up and receive more information, visit http://www.xeal.com/webinar.htm.

On this weekly show airing on WebmasterRadio.FM, contextual advertising authority Jennifer Slegg interviews leading online advertising and publishing experts. Listeners will also benefit from learning about the latest tools available from the search engines.

WebmasterRadio.FM hosts a daily schedule of shows covering a variety of internet marketing strategies and tactics, with a focus on search engine optimization. Listeners can tune in with with Windows Media, iTunes or Real Player.

Learn more from Jennifer at JenSense.com.

At 10:00am each Friday, Danny Sullivan hosts a weekly review of search news at at WebmasterRadio.FM.  The show is a weekly review of The Daily SearchCast program, which is a recap of the previous day's search news presented daily at 11:30am.  Podcasts can be downloaded at from the site at The

On December 7, Marty M. Fahnke held a call with Will Reynolds of SEER interactive to discuss the misinformation out there about search engine optimization.  Marty was also joined by Kellie Stevens of AffiliateFairPlay.com to talk about the quality assurance considerations of affiliate marketing.

Shawn Collins announced that a replay of this call is now available.  Links to the replay are available on Collins' blog. 

On Tuesday, December 19th at 9 pm ET, Sean Wu will be sitting down with SEO and social networking expert John Caviani. Topics will include how to quickly and easily set up your own social bookmarking sites to drive traffic, the most important components a social bookmarking site must have, and linking strategies for optimal SEO results. There is no cost for the call. The number for the call is 712-432-3900, pin 2202542.

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz shares his thoughts about how DMOZ, once a valuable site to have a link from, has since faded off into the sunset. "DMOZ's activity has slowed to a crawl - new sites aren't being accepted," says Fishkin, "the editors have closed ranks to stifle discussion and those listings that do exist are typically quite stale". Read Fishkin's full commentary over at SEOmoz.

"Ever wanted to spy deep inside a competitors search marketing campaign?", asks Christine Churchill of Search Engine Watch. "A competitive intelligence tool from Hitwise shows you exactly which search terms are driving the most traffic to your competitors' web sites."

The new tool, called Search Intelligence, has data available from over 800,000 websites in 174 industries. Visit Churchill's blog post for a nice overview of the tool.

Vanessa Fox, Google's Product Manager for Webmaster Central, recommends the use of the meta description tag to resolve a potential indexing issue.

"There has always been confusion on if Google uses the meta tag data. Some say Google uses the meta description tag, some say they don't", says Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Rountable. "Most say, Google doesn't use the meta keywords tag. In any event, Google's Vanessa Fox said that you should use the meta description tag." See exactly what Fox had to say over at the SEO Roundtable blog.

According a thread over at Search Engine Watch, the answer appears to be yes. The Search Engine Roundtable blog points to a particular posting on the thread where a user received a response from the MSN Spam Team stating that he had been banned for "acquiring links through posting to or exchanging links with sites unrelated to your site content.". Read more about the discussion at Search Engine Roundtable.

Jim Boykin announced on his blog today that he's updated his SEO analysis tool and renamed it "The Top Ten Analysis SEO Tool".  Given a website and a search phrase, the tool will show a variety of statistics for about a website and compare it to the top 10 websites for that phase.  For each site, the tool shows its number of backlinks, Alexa ranking, Allinanchor rank, age of the URL, and several other statistics.  Read Boykin's blog for full details.

Peter Davis is offering free transcriptions of 14 video tutorials previously released by Google and SEO expert Matt Cutts. Davis also includes links to the videos themselves for those that have not yet seen the tutorials. Kudos to Dave Naylor at Threadwatch for breaking the news.

Brad Fallon (of the million dollar site, MyWeddingFavors.com) and Andy Jenkins (Yahoo! store guru) released a new report with 7 case studies of how regular people used their techniques to rank highly in the search engines. Read the report here. They have also launched a new blog at www.StomperBlog.com.

Michael Duz of SEO Blog has published a listing of the seven major forums for SEO and SEM. Along with this list, Duz also ran a test to gauge the quality of each forum by measuring the number of page views and responses to a standardized question. Michael's results can be viewed here.

Brad Fallon and Andy Jenkins are releasing a series of videos with tips on traffic generation, SEO, conversion and marketing. The videos include results from their online businesses and those of their clients. They explain how they went from $0 to $16,000 a day in sales with search optimization. The videos are available for free at http://www.convertlinks.com/videohelp.