By: Lee Odden | Source: toprankblog.com

With so many blogs being created every day, it’s a mystery to many bloggers how to make their blog stand out. There are many types of blogs or purposes for blogs and a certain number of tactics are applicable to just about all of them, so here is a “short” list of tips for marketing and optimizing a blog:

1. Decide on a stand alone domain name www.myblog.com or directory of existing site www.mysite.com/blog. Sub domain is also an option blog.mysite.com. Avoid hosted services that do not allow you to use your own domain name!

2. Obtain and install customizable blog software - WordPress and Moveable Type are my favorites.

3. Customize blog look and feel templates - aka design.

4. Research keywords and develop a glossary - Keyword Discovery, WordTracker, SitePoint, SEOBook Keyword Research.

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By: Louise | Source: nytimes.com

Google and Yahoo have been fighting it out over which company will dominate the online advertising business, with Google maintaining the upper hand so far.

But in the competition for contextual text ads — those small sponsored links that run adjacent to related articles online — both companies are facing a challenge from a tiny but growing adversary named Quigo Technologies, a New York-based ad service that bills itself as an alternative to the giants.

In the last year and a half, a trickle of large media sites like ESPN.com, FoxNews.com
and Cox Newspapers’ 17 sites have stopped using Google and Yahoo and instead signed up with Quigo.

What Quigo offers is transparency and control in what can often be an opaque business: advertisers pay Yahoo and Google for contextual ad placement on a wide variety of Web pages, but get little say over where those ads run or even a list of sites where they do appear.

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By: John Hill | Source: seo-news.com

Here we offer you a complete guide as to what this phenomenon is, who is likely to commit such an act, how to identify & prevent click fraud and how to best report instances of suspected click fraud on your PPC campaign.

What is Click Fraud?

According to Wikipedia "Click fraud is a type of internet crime that occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script, or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad’s link"

Click Fraud is estimated to range from 5% - 15% of pay-per-click traffic (some estimates are as high as 20% - 35%) although Google estimates click fraud at only 2% due to the rigorous detection methods they claim are in place.

In a recent study by Click Forensics, click fraud reached a new high of 14.2% in the last quarter of 2006 with the average rate of click fraud on ‘content networks’ as high as 19.2% for the same quarter.

So Who is Likely To Commit Click Fraud?

The click fraud villain is most likely to fall into one of three categories:

• Online vandals with nothing better to do than cause a nuisance.

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