According to an exclusive story in the National Journal Online, John McCain has outspent Barack Obama for two consecutive months in search engine advertising. Written by Lucas Grindley, the story, entitled, " McCain buys his way to top of Google ," cites Nielsen Online data that shows McCain bought 7 million "sponsored search link impressions" in June and 5.4 million in May, compared with 1.15 million for Obama in June and 1.8 million during the previous month.

On Sitepoint Clinton Lee wrote a 6 page high quality web site valuation guide . The New York Times recently published a great article about flipping websites , quoting my buddy Peter Davis . Shane Pike recently blogged about selling one of his sites to Internet Brands . The site he sold was the one that let him quit his job. I gave him some tips on how to build traffic and increase monetization during a 15 minute chat at Elite Retreat in December of 2006.

Because of the low cost of online distribution a company can quickly grow from being one of your affiliates, to one of your leading sales channels, to being the leading competitor. And once they grow into a destination you can't just cut them off without hurting your customers or your brand, as Ryanair will soon find out .

So basically, what SearchMonkey does is allow publishers to push their customized content look and feel right into the Yahoo Search results. Well, not push, actually, but make available, based on open formats. So for users who opt into the widget for any given company's rich content, if the listing for that content comes up in search results, custom look-and-feel info included. So if it's a Yelp review, you get a bit of the Yelp "richness, look, and feel" right on Yahoo.

It is fun to watch Tamar Weinberg and John Andrews write about social media. Largely because they are both firm in their beliefs, and they believe polar opposites. Tamar's piece covering the definition of social media marketers is uplifting and paints social media as friendships to be won rather than games to be played and people to be fooled. But bots and ad networks are amoral, and they control the production of much of the free content.

Social bookmarking can deliver a lot of traffic to any site if it is managed properly. For most site owners, particularly bloggers, they submit their page to StumbleUpon or Digg, nag those in their contact list to support the submission, then sit back and expect record traffic. Generally speaking, social bookmarking it not that easy. Once you have submitted your page, you need to start to market it which means socializing.

WordPress is by far the most popular blog software in use at present.? Out of the box, most WordPress themes are terrible when it comes to SEO.? So bad in fact it could actually be costing you when it comes to search result placings. Many of the SEO problems associated with WordPress can be fixed. If you have obtained an SEO friendly theme then some of these problems should have been taken care of. SEO problems include: Sidebar code appears before the content.

Have you launched your back to school PPC campaigns yet? It's time. If you have not already done so then now is the time to get those back to school PPC campaigns optimized and activated. The first day of school is just around the corner. So what types of products are great for selling this time of year? School Supplies - Of course. Every student, from pre-school to college, will need school supplies. Now is the time to get that advertising campaign going.

SEO can be a complex process with a host of variables that could be tweaked. At the same time there is a bare bones approach to SEO that can get your site, and more importantly, its pages, on the road to a reasonable search result placement. It should be remembered that search engines return pages as results, not sites, however this doesn't mean that a sites ranking are not important. Everything counts. These bare bones SEO tips should be considered the bare minimum.

Those who have been watching closely while Google and Yahoo iron out some kinks in their search ad deal would be glad to know that the two search engines have partially disclosed some information about it. In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Google and Yahoo have made publicly available the contract governing their advertising agreement,