This copyright lesson from YouTube featuring the homicidal, suicidal and just plain crazy cute fluffy characters of Happy Tree Friends highlights some of the risks of copyright infringement, and explains what sorts of content are subject to copyright. It also tells you what to do if you find your copyrighted work has been uploaded to YouTube. Click to read the rest of this post…

Testing ad copy is essential to the efficient running of a paid search campaign. Poor ad copy is the difference between trust and recognition of your brand in an extremely competitive marketplace which, if you learn the hard way, will have ultimately cost you hundreds of dollars in lost opportunities. By contrast, fantastic ad copy saves you money, increases the visibility and delivery of your ads and gives you a continual edge on your competitors.

SearchIgnite, an online marketing platform technology company, has rebranded itself as IgnitionOne to coincide with the launch of it’s new “digital marketing suite”. Previously known for having a demand side platform (DSP) and a paid search automated bid management platform (ABM) that were tightly integrated to make display ad buying more like paid search , their latest technology adds “the missing piece of the online marketing puzzle”, which is automating content delivery around search and social media lead scoring. The new brand logo for IgnitionOne has three overlapping circles which simultaneously indicate a progression for the company itself and is also intended to symbolize a progression for marketing technology platforms in the industry.

Strange as it is strange for me to see “Ads by Twitter” on a Google search results page, as opposed to “Ads by Google.” It is not strange as it is a new thing, because Google has been displayed Twitter ads on Google Real Time Search since November 2010…

Google saw some small gains for the first time since September, according to comScore’s March 2011 search engine market share rankings. Bing also continued its slow and steady growth, while Yahoo, Ask, and AOL saw less searches — with AOL and Ask both hitting new lows. Click to read the rest of this post…

ComScore Video Metrix has just released the March 2011 U.S.

In managing SEO, you have to think more than just about getting great rankings for targeted keywords and scalable traffic. You should to expense some time and energy into optimizing your SEO funnel, from when the visitor clicks your link in the SERPs and comes on over to your highly ranked blog posts because rankings and traffic mean nothing without conversions and sales. Here are 4 ways to optimize your funnel for when people come through the search engines and stumble upon your blog posts 1

I’ve noticed recently that more and more people with writing backgrounds (ie journalists, English majors, etc.) are landing in direct response online copywriting jobs. Without delving too deeply into the reasons for this, I think it’s useful to think about how to help equip these people with the tools they’ll need to be strong copywriters, and in this case strong PPC copywriters in particular. Whether they’re working on ad text or landing page copy there are a series of basic tenants that I think are helpful to convey to strong writers who are new to the Web and direct response

A very active SEO in the Google forums posted a thread at the Google Webmaster Help forums asking why does it seem Google is contradicting itself with their advice on how to handle duplicate content…