Many people are promoting a meme on why they blog and why you should blog. I thought I would cover it from the other angle. What are the downsides of running a popular blog and selling an information product?

Tips on how to find related keyword phrases for keywords that are rarely searched for.

Need a game plan for making the most of the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York next week? Greg Jarboe has tips from a veteran conference-goer.

Found in the search marketing forums: Quality Score Calculation; Submitting Video to Search Engines; Confusing Keyword Research Results; and more.

If you buy targeted advertising and have a quality site it doesn't hurt to buy a bit of exposure the get the ball rolling. If you can break even while buying and selling ads that send visitors to / through your site without making it look cheap, tacky, or untrustworthy you are ahead, because that traffic will improve the algorithmic trustworthiness of your site. Exposure breeds exposure, etc.

If you watch TV, the things you see people talking about are what many people are searching for.

Currently there is little risk to using Google cost per action ads, but long-term I think the risk proposition is much uglier than most people appreciate. 5 reasons Adam Smith would be proud of Google.

If you are empathetic towards a market and have interests aligned with a market you do not need to understand how search engines work. Search engines follow people.

Effectively building a site's link profile consists of thinking of different types of goals you must satisfy to rank.

Many people are recycling and reformatting various ideas to promote them in lists of top 10 xyz's. The problem with formatting them as such is that one can get similar from going to Del.icio.us or StumbleUpon. If you add context to your page, and state why the top 10 things are the best your page is much more linkworthy.

SEO for Firefox now numbers the search results, and allows you to re-sort the search results by any variable.

Because I offer a marketing related ebook and blog about marketing stuff I get about 20 emails a month asking me if I reviewed product x or heard of person y. Most of the time these are hyped short lived marketing products or services that are repackaged ideas from 6 months earlier that upsell people on other junk. This is my general review guide on what types of products and services are trustworthy.

Featured posts to the Search Engine Watch blog in the past week, along with recent search-related headlines from around the Web.

At The Kelsey Group's recent Drilling Down on Local conference, the local search buzz was all about video and mobile.

No matter what category you are competing in, you are going to have some minimum baseline writing, design, research, link building, and marketing costs. It is likely more profitable to be an established unique site in a field of sites all offering the same thing than it is try to be a market leader in a market with low search volume and virtually no commercial intent.

Every day bloggers and members of the media are looking for stories to talk about. If you are afraid to be associated with and talk about your own projects how can you expect others to talk about it? How can you get people to talk about you as much as they talk about competing channels if you are anonymous?

Search engines try to benchmark information quality, and create a structure which encourages the creation and open sharing of higher quality content. When you see poor sites at the top of search results view it as a sign of opportunity. Realize that whatever ranks today is probably not what search engines want, but it is what is considered best giving the lack of structure to the web and how poor most websites are.

Google can never show the most relevant results for everything. No matter what algorithmic loopholes they close they inadvertently open up others. And anything they trust gets abused by marketers.

Domainers and investors developing low quality automated websites will force Google to trust exact match domain names less than they currently do.