Google maintains that market forces keep prices from becoming outrageous.
It doesn't set prices, letting advertisers determine how much they're willing
to spend, though higher prices work in Google's favor.
Some advertisers complain it's like turning over their money and letting
Google do whatever it wants to decide where an advertisement runs. What's more,
new, unsophisticated advertisers could end up forking over too much money
because they don't realize they could get decent placement and not pay as much,
a study by Harvard, Stanford and UC Berkeley researchers said.

In a study, MarketingExperiments.com found that up to 30 percent of clicks on Google and its partner sites could be fake. "By the time it's happening, you've already paid for it," said Jalali Hartman, director of strategy for MarketingExperiments.com.

In most cases, Google wipes out fraudulent clicks before its customers even have a chance to see them. The firm uses software, which its engineers continually update, to search for irregular clicking patterns and filter out what it believes are invalid clicks. It also deploys a team of employees to analyze and investigate account data for possible fraud.

"It's like the radar detection industry. You have two constituents trying to outsmart each other," said Stylman of Reprise Media. "This is perhaps the only visible risk to a booming industry. There is a lot at stake for (Google)."

The depth of the problem isn't clear, because Google will not disclose details about click fraud. Google's Schmidt said Thursday that the impact of click fraud is "not material" and declined to get more specific. Google also said that studies on click fraud are wildly exaggerated and the number of fraudulent clicks it removes beforehand is far more than the number of requests it's received for refunds, which is "very small."

In January, U.S. consumers used Google for 2.8 billion searches, or nearly 50 percent all of online queries, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. That helped produce 41.1 billion sponsored links in January on Google and its partner sites. And the experience with click fraud hasn't stopped E-magine Networks and other businesses from continuing to use Google.

Throughout my experience with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the one frustration I have encountered the most is the lack of desire many CEOs and higher-ups have to understand that ranking high is *not* the end goal they should care about. It should be leads and conversions. Ranking highly for a keyword is only as good as its performance for you while it sits in a coveted top position in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)

If your SEO agency/guru doesn’t offer keyword research as a part of the plan (even if you give them a whole bunch of keywords you think you should rank for), then you’re most likely going to waste your money — even if they get you ranking.

If nothing else, it is for this reason alone that SEO is a perpetual process and one that you should figure out a way to budget for, for a considerable span of time (6-months to a year, at least). Some people budget for SEO indefinitely because a really good SEO can make adjustments to keyword priorities, landing pages, content, et al to allow you to capitalize on as much of the traffic as possible.

Everyone's primary goal in search optimization is to get their own site's content to rank first (or as close as possible to first) for specific keywords. If, however, you are having a bit of trouble doing that, it doesn't hurt to help content you have created on other sites to rank well for similar keywords in search - just make sure that content is branded well enough so people know who to credit for it.

1. YouTube Videos
YouTube is owned by Google, hence videos on their network are a shoe-in for ranking well in search results. The following parts of your YouTube video details are used for the video page's SEO optimization.

SEO Title: Your video page's most important SEO element is the video title itself. This is where you will want your brand name and keywords if you can fit them both together. YouTube will append - YouTube to the end of the title.
Meta Description: Your video page's meta description is pulled from the video description you enter. This one gets a little tricky as some people like to include their link first to get clicks from their videos to their website. But if you can include that plus a keyword-enhanced description within 160 characters, you're set.
Meta Keywords: Google may not care about meta keywords, but be sure to use them anyway, even if it is just for enhancing your chance of being found on YouTube itself. The tags for your video are used as the meta keywords for the video page. YouTube separates keyword phrases by space, not comma, so be sure to put quotes around a keyword phrase.
H1 Tag: YouTube uses your video's title again in the H1 tag, sans the -YouTube.

Companies may have just one chance to convert a Twitter brand page visitor to a follower and need to make best use of the new page features, according to a recently released eye tracking study.

Not surprisingly, users’ eyes were first drawn to imagery on the page, usually in the promoted tweet pinned at the top. This caused some confusion, as brand page header banners aren’t clickable; users tried to click a URL in the image and were annoyed that they couldn’t click through for further information.

Twitter is on a tear, we expect them to continue to partner with brands even more to have locally relevant, language specific real-time marketing conversations that will increase both brand and Twitter usage exponentially.

Therefore, we need to better understand their needs and desires and incorporate them into our Web design processes. By doing so, we'll be able to bridge the gap between setting the right SEM promise and delivering with the expected Web site experience.

Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?

Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?

Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency?

Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?

Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?

Many clients have asked about the technical aspects of SEO and how to achieve high rankings and Web site visibility without any regard to their Web site and how it functions. Many people think they will automatically get the rankings they desire just by applying certain techniques to their site. They don't understand how closely tied a highly usable site is to SEO.

Consider a highly "usable" Web site that is well thought out and includes clearly defined rich content, relevant headers and tags, and has an easy to follow button and linking structure. Is that not parallel to SEO best practices?

Then, if your site has the content people are looking for, you will likely find people will want to link to that content. This is link building at its finest.

Designing with the User in Mind

Are you in the process of building a new Web site? Or maybe you're redesigning a site? Let's look at a simple process I've used for more than 10 years with tremendous success that will help you generate a compelling user experience:

Initial user interviews

Wireframes or sitemaps based on user interviews

Clickable prototype

Follow-up user interviews

Visual design treatments

Combine HTML and programming with visual treatments for the finished site

It's more important that a visitor has a great user experience than to have a pretty Web site with gorgeous graphics or lots of Flash. Though many people like to let this drive the site design, many sites that are less than attractive in their design make information easy to find.

So news organizations large and small have begun experimenting with tweaking their Web sites for better search engine results. But software bots are not your ordinary readers: They are blazingly fast yet numbingly literal-minded. There are no algorithms for wit, irony, humor or stylish writing. The software is a logical, sequential, left-brain reader, while humans are often right brain.

The first headline a human reader sees: "Unsafe sex: Has Jacob Zuma's rape trial hit South Africa's war on AIDS?" One click down: "Zuma testimony sparks HIV fear." Another headline meant to lure the human reader: "Tulsa star: The life and career of much-loved 1960's singer." One click down: "Obituary: Gene Pitney."

Journalists, they say, would be wise to do a little keyword research to determine the two or three most-searched words that relate to their subject — and then include them in the first few sentences. "That's not something they teach in journalism schools," said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch, an online newsletter. "But in the future, they should."

Your site has at least as many pages of crawlable content - content that you can cut-and-paste from your browser into MS Word - as your competitors.
You stick to the basic tenets of quality SEO copywriting. Write using a solid semantic structure, and use good link text.
You write every day. I'm sorry, but this is the only way to produce good content. You must add to and update your site steadily and often. Daily is best. Weekly is OK. Monthly is not enough. Annually means you should find another job.
You are patient. If you add 10 pages to your site this month, you'll see most of the effect of those additions a few months down the line.
You write with your customer - not search engines - in mind. If you write for search engines you may gain a high ranking, but you'll fail to qualify most new customers. So traffic growth might not mean sales growth.
Everything you write is unique. Duplicate content may earn you the search engines' cold shoulder. Be sure whatever you put on your site cannot be found elsewhere on the internet. There are exceptions to this rule, but 99% of the time it holds true.
If you can't do your own copywriting hire a professional to do it for you.
Writing is one of the top priorities in your budget and/or plans for the year.