Since not every single one gets clicked on, Google’s ads might be considered less than perfect. A new patent application would make behavioral targeting a central part of improving them.

Patent news is, of course, somewhat noncommittal by nature. We’ve all heard about patent trolls - people (or companies) who try to own every obvious detail or outlandish possibility purely for the sake of profit. And even though Google doesn’t fall into this category, it (along with most other businesses) doesn’t make use of every patent for which it applies.

I personally have been Tweeting for a few months. But I use the phrase “tweeting for a few months” loosely. I haven’t been all that consistent with it, and I definitely didn’t have a strategy. I just thought it was kind of cool.

Recently I’ve started paying more attention to it for a few reasons; my mother-in-law was at a librarian conference recently and attended a session on Twitter. I got into a conversation with her about it, and then the next day I saw John Reese’s email about Twitter. It seems like there is a lot of twittering about Twitter going on. What is Twitter?

Using the right SEO software is one of the most important things you can do for your website’s success but finding it is not always easy. The products you hear the most about are often just the most advertised and not necessarily the best, or at least not the best to fit your particular needs.

For the most part, just about any product can help you in some way unless it’s a real piece of junk. So if you already have one and are not getting the results you want, try to spend a little more time with it and make it pay off. But if you are looking, read on. This article focuses on three that have helped thousands get the ranking they need. Even if one is not right for you, you can see what the top rated tools do.

If content is king, make your keywords your servants! It’s pretty simple; good keywords bring lots of traffic, bad ones don’t. If you want that free search engine traffic, the first thing you need to do is to find out what exactly it is that people are searching for in the area that you are interested in. Then you pick key words that relate to your topic of interest, and that people are really searching for. You can have the best content in the world, but if you optimize for the wrong keywords you still won’t get that sought after traffic.

In his keynote speech for SMX Sydney, Danny Sullivan mentioned something that really resonated with me. He talked about how he sees social media marketing and SEO as reinforcing each other, like that old cartoon, the Wonder Twins where the brother and sister touched their hands together to create some awesome power to defeat the bad guys.

Yet Danny says that some of the search industry veterans have been complaining loudly about social media. “I don’t wanna be a social media marketer!”, they say. “Damn kids! It’s just not SEO.”

How Mergers and Acquisitions May Change the Search Engine Playing Field - and Where Google Comes In

Until recently, there were five major players in the search engine world: Google, MSN, AOL, Ask.com, and the Yahoo! search engine. These top Internet search engines quickly could be narrowed down to four, however; AOL uses the Google algorithm and will yield nearly identical results. Further narrowing is rapidly occurring - Ask.com seems to be stepping out of the spotlight to focus on specific markets, and in early March 2008, Microsoft began attempting to purchase the Yahoo! search engine. If there are just two top search engines with which to be concerned, what does this mean for your business and for SEO as a whole?

As an email marketer you may face email deliverability issues every day. Whether you’re sending a personal email or bulk customer communication, electronic messages are frequently intercepted, filtered, erroneously labeled as spam, bounced or returned to the sender as undeliverable. For routine non-business correspondence, this is simply a minor annoyance and inconvenience. But when your message broadcasts a crisis or emergency, or if it includes time-sensitive account, billing or service information, you could face serious consequences. If you’re a marketer, every undelivered message translates into lost revenue. Luckily, there are ways to improve the odds of delivery and decrease the chance of running into problems in the first place.

In today’s online world search engine rankings can make your business succeed, and while rankings in Yahoo and MSN are very valuable, their combined market value is still less than that of Google. This makes achieving top rankings in Google that much more important.

In this three-part series on How to Optimize for Google we will touch on a number of important aspects for top Google rankings including website optimization, links, Google Webmaster tools, and a number of other considerations.

The focus of Part 1 will be with on page website optimization.

The reason Google is the most successful search engine in the world is because they provide the best search results; pages ranked by tangible value. That tangible value is a combination of content and links, with links being the more important factor (they assume any pages linking in will only link to good content or risk their own ranking.)

Here are a few tips that will help you take full advantage of Google’s love of linking…

1.) Link Deep and with Relevance

Determining the reality of Twitter might be a question best reserved for later, or never. Reality’s difficult enough in the so-called “real” physical world. The trouble with Twitter, like the trouble with many things people will argue about, is a trouble originating with humans, not the thing itself: the need to define a thing.

What is it? What is it used for? What is its potential? What are the limits? Who else is using it and why? What can we learn from it? Should I be using it too? Is it okay if I walk away from it? Do I have to use the word “tweet?”