For those of you interested in learning more about optimizing your campaigns for the holidays, I wanted to make sure you saw the Holiday Advertising Guide on advertising.microsoft.com . The guide includes some interesting data: Online retail shopping.

An SEO strategy is an organic process. Your SEO campaign should change focus as your popularity grows. The SEO approach for an established site can be quite different to that of a new site, mainly because, with an established site, you can leverage the power of your inbound linking. Google favors the already "rich" . The Google algorithm reinforces the establishment. If your site has become "the establishment", you may only need to work with Google, rather than against them,

Economic crisis. Layoffs. Companies going out of business. Foreclosures. Sure, this is a flyspeck of a footnote relative to issues of much greater gravity. But if you're an e-mail marketer, tough times call for a tough approach to e-mail list hygiene. Particularly for marketers who mail to B2B or corporate clients. The person at the other end of a subscription to a newsletter, or who had requested offers or product updates,

Media companies have been spending much time, effort, and money on stopping online piracy at sites like YouTube and MySpace through expensive lawsuits and vigilance. In essence they end up playing a game of global whack-a-mole ??" shutting down sites or suppressing content only to have their copyrighted material pop up somewhere else overnight. So if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

It's amazing, but online marketers are still arguing about which is better - SEO or social media. I don't know why it has to be either/or. Why can't it be both? Well, it should be. Marketers need to learn to make SEO and social media work together. They're two different tools with two different purposes and learning how to make both work for you is key to being successful online. SEO, or search engine optimization,

adCenter Help has been updated to reflect the many changes since last week's release . New topics include Pause an ad and Pause a keyword . The Microsoft adCenter Help URLs spreadsheet is updated as well. This spreadsheet allows you to bookmark Help.

On Saturday, November 8th, 2008 the AdWords system will be unavailable from approximately 10AM to 2PM PST , for maintenance. While you won't be able to sign in to your accounts during this time, your campaigns will continue to run as usual. AdWords system maintenance typically occurs on the second Saturday of each month from 10AM to 2PM PST. We'll continue to update you via the blog as we always have,

How can you estimate the return on investment for optimizing your Web site? The Website Optimization ROI Calculator , a new interactive tool, was developed by interactive agency ZAAZ. It helps digital marketers estimate return based on anticipated outcomes such as increasing site traffic. Plug in the numbers, for instance, to evaluate how an investment can change the present and future value of your business. For more details behind the calculator,

by Jon Brooks Some conservatives may still be worried about President Obama stocking his Cabinet with a gallery of liberal bogeymen. Secretary of State Al Sharpton, anyone? Attorney General Ralph Nader? Secretary of Secretaries Bill Clinton? Well, advance buzz has the president-elect considering a decidedly more mainstream slate of candidates. Illinois Rep. and former Clinton staffer Rahm Emanuel has been offered the Chief of Staff job,

Y. on August 8 this year sent in information about a big Google ranking drop of his song lyrics website, which people usually find using a query like "song title" lyrics (e.g. irreplaceable lyrics ): <<[I] am part of a (lyrics) site network, and my site had over 200k visitors a day, but 3 days ago google somehow gave a penalty to our site, and another lyrics site in our network. Also other sites I know webmasters of seem to have gotten a huge penalty,