SEO. Search engine optimization. SEM. Internet marketing. Keyword research! You’ve heard the buzzwords and seen the effects on the Web. Maybe you want to know why Uncle Bob’s Widget-Wrangling Emporium uses the same phrases to describe its wares over and over again, or why an errant Google search dumped you into a wasteland of nonsense text and wacky links. Our blog has some answers (we’ve written a lot of material for beginners), but it’s high time we tackled the big question behind it all: How do people start an Internet marketing campaign?

A would-be marketing consultant sent me a pretty silly email today. I want to share it with you because it’s a perfect examples of what to avoid when you’re looking for marketing help. I edited out repetitive dumbness (you can only mock someone using bad grammar to offer content services so many times), and removed the lime green text color, but the rest is straight from the original, awful email.

Last time around we chewed on some food for thought about domain registration. We explored the “big three” top level domains (TLDs): dot-com, dot-net and dot-org, along with cousins dot-biz and dot-info. This time, we’re going to explore a few more TLD strategies. It’s a bit of a trip, because more than anything else, TLDs help the Web live up to its “world wide” moniker.

This time around, read about the merits of and methods behind ghostblogging at Search Engine Journal. Thanks goes out to them for the opportunity. Check it out!

As part of our ongoing work to get the word out about us and general Internet marketing, we’ve written a guest article at quickonlinetips.com. Head on over and read “9 Easy Tips for Effective Business Blogging.” Thanks go out to their staff for giving us another venue to talk to the public.

Domain names are weird. In the wild and woolly days of the early Web, users picked domains based on a quirky sense of humor or raw, boring functionality. A domain name was nothing more than an address, and unless you picked a strange one, it was about as significant to you as your street number: important, but hardly representative of who you are.

Tag, you’re it! Or, you may well be “it” when you make the best use of your page title tags for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes. Aside from writing quality content, a well-constructed title is the best thing you can do for your web page. A title doesn’t look important when you’re actually viewing the page, but to a search engine those words in the top right are your page’s main topic and gateway. When you search, every result is a page title - and “untitled” stinks. Google usually shuffles them to the back. Even when it doesn’t, untitled pages look kind of dodgy, like an unlicensed hot dog cart with a dirty sign. Sure, it might give you something tasty - and it might give you worms, too.

In our last episode in this series we talked about quality scores and how they can make or break your PPC campaign. When it comes to managing your advertising budget, quality is king. If your quality score is low in relation to a coveted keyword (remember that your score changes per word, per campaign and for your business as a whole) you’ll pay through the nose - and your high-quality competitors can beat your bid by spending a fraction of what you’d pay. Quality scores ensure that PPC providers get their money’s worth. People won’t click on bad ads as often, so the search engines want more money per low-quality click.

In our last installment we talked about PPC basics. In a nutshell: You bid on keywords and when someone uses them as search words, your ad pops up.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is one of the foundations of internet marketing. Without these keyword and context-based ads there’d be no Google or Yahoo; the web would be a much different looking (and less profitable) place.