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The Monday after Thanksgiving is Black Monday, the largest online shopping day of the year. In fact the two months before Christmas is often the peak selling time for many online businesses and U.S. shoppers are expected to spend 47% of their holiday gift budget shopping online. Are you using Google AdWords effectively so you can take advantage of this peak selling time? Here are some tips from experts at Google AdWords and MarketMotive on how to take advantage of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) search advertising during the Holidays.

Recently I’ve blogged about Google AdWords PPC vs Inbound Marketing and if you Should You Do Inbound Marketing or Google AdWords? There are some businesses where inbound marketing just doesn’t fit and a full-fledged Google AdWords campaign is just a little too complicated and a little too much. For example a coffee shop is not going to increase latte sales by blogging and the time and effort to set up Google AdWords campaign is out of the question because the coffee shop doesn’t even have a website. You know exactly who you are. You are a local business, you want to compete against the bigger businesses but the thought of putting up a web site and managing an ad campaign is just too much. Google AdWords Express could be just the thing you are looking for.

Deciding whether to do a Google AdWords pay-per-click (PPC) campaign or try inbound marketing can be a little confusing. There are some differences as I pointed out in my post, Google AdWords PPC vs Inbound Marketing, but they are not mutually exclusive. In fact you can do both. Building a keyword strategy benefits both and no matter what you do you’ll be building calls-to-actions and landing pages. Here are five questions you can ask to help you make a decision.

There are some common myths that inbound marketing and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising like Google AdWords’ paid search are mutually exclusive. You do one or the other and if you are a proponent of one you are against the other. Nothing could be farther from the truth. They each play a specific role and can even support each other. Many of the concepts and techniques are the same but the reasons to use one strategy over the other may be different and the results may be different. Let’s take a look at some of the differences.

One of the main goals of inbound marketers is to get their website to show up, or rank, in online internet searches. There are a number of ways to achieve this with search engine optimization, content creations or with paid search such as Google AdWords. Recent marketing research has demonstrated why turning up in online searches is so important: a lot of people are using online searches to find information and research brands and products before they buy. Below are 20 statistics from recent marketing research. Each fact is interesting on its own but taken as a whole they make a compelling argument for optimizing your website for organic search and moving marketing dollars from traditional advertising models to inbound marketing and pay-per-click advertising.

In my last two blogs, Saving your Small Business SEO from Penguins, and Penguins and your Small Business SEO Strategy, I have been talking about the presentation by Geoff Kenyon on Blog Networks, Penguins, & Link Building given at a meeting of the Seattle SEO Network. One of the points Geoff made was that no one should have been surprised by the Penguin updates from Google and the fact that Google was targeting spammy links. Google has been talking about what they have considered good SEO and link building for years. What then, many of the small business owners asked at the meeting, should they do? Many of them do not have the budgets to hire SEO Companies to set their SEO strategy.

In my last blog, Saving your Small Business SEO from Penguins, I mentioned Geoff Kenyon’s talk on Blog Networks, Penguins, & Link Building at a meeting of the Seattle SEO Network. One of the things I noticed was that the attendees tended to fall into one of three groups:

Last week I went to a meeting of the Seattle SEO Network where I had an opportunity to hear a talk on Blog Networks, Penguins, & Link Building by Geoff Kenyon. Geoff is an impressive young man who is a SEO Consultant at Distilled and a Global Associate at SEOmoz so my inclination is to accept him as an authority on the subject. The focus of the discussion was Google’s new algorithm released in April called Penguin. For some details on the changes visit Google’s blog: Search quality highlights: 52 changes for April.