Once upon a time in a faraway land, there was a kingdom.  And in this kingdom there was a single king.  His name was Google.  There were other nearby kingdoms, called Yahoo and MSN Live Search, but they were so small and inconsequential that none of the peasants bothered to go there.  The common man [...]

An often overlooked and undervalued aspect of the SEM campaign is the negative keyword.  I don’t think I even used negative keywords in the first few SEM campaigns I worked on many years ago.  However, neglecting these is a rookie mistake that can result in poor click through rates and wasted clicks. Negative keywords exclude [...]

A few months ago, there was a big hubbub about changes Yahoo made to their search marketing terms of service.  They announced that they were now allowing themselves unfettered access to make changes to your campaigns at will, courtesy of their “search marketing specialists.”  This access was such that you had to go out of [...]

There is so much to say about keywords, I can’t possibly put it all in one post – they are that important.  Once you’ve fleshed out your goal, you need to dive headfirst into your search for keywords.  Establish the most important keywords for your campaign and use them as the cornerstone of your account; [...]

I decided to start an “SEM for Dummies” style series to help teach SEM novices how to build, develop, and optimize a viable paid search campaign, without all the boring, obvious, and typically unnecessary prattle you’d get in a webinar or multi-day conference. If you think the place to start is the keywords or even [...]