By Will Critchlow

You know you’re an entrepreneur when you’re sitting in the cinema wondering how much money you could have made by buying popcorn wholesale and selling it at the door…

You know you’re into SEO when you look at SERPs like “leeds hairdresser” and you wonder how quickly you can skill yourself up as a hairdresser, how much you could afford to charge per cut (CPC) and what your ROI would be…

Now most startup businesses fail in the their first year (Related stats) and that figure might seem daunting if you’re thinking of starting a business, but the truth is that these businesses were doomed to failure anyway “robot horses??)

By Saravanan S

Pay per click is what that got me started in search marketing back in Aug 2004.
Being so new to the field I started reading up whatever article I could find about
PPC, downloaded e-books, played a bit the keyword suggestion tools and the newfound
knowledge about keyword demand, supply, competition, KEI, Ads, Landing pages,
Conversion was fascinating.

It took me a couple of weeks to learn these, prepare a keyword list, write
some ads and launch a google adwords campaign. And the first time I saw the
ad show up for the targeted keyword in the top position among 15 other competitors
that was a great feeling.

By Martin Muehl

The most important On Page optimization techniques include content optimization, the title-tag, several META-Tags, headlines & text decoration, alt- and title-attributes and continuous actualization.

(1) Content Optimization

This is a tough one, because you should of course concentrate on your user and easy readability, but you always have to have an eye on the search engines as well. For your users it’s clear what a certain page is about if it’s written in the headline, but for search engines it’s better to repeat the important keywords several times. So you have to strike the right balance:

By Joost de Valk

Running your sites like you'd run a pub

What would you think your townsmen would consider the best pubs in your town? What do you base that on? I bet you thought of a pub immediately when you read that question, and that you don't know the answer to the second question that fast.

Now you should really get to know what makes a pub popular. It matters because what makes things popular doesn’t really different between the online and the offline world. It’s all about creating a buzz, making people talk about you (or link to you, the online equivalent) and making them feel something is happening that they shouldn’t miss.

You know what drives you out of a pub, don’t you? Consider some of the things that might:

By Ian Parker

Though I have been intermittently online since 1996, I’ve been semi-computer-literate since the days of Planetfall and Mousepaint. I have been doing SEO for almost 2 years. I can trace the start of my career to SES New York in 2005. I do in-house SEO for a growing company, #1 for our most competitive keyword, and the advice I offer here originates from our own experiences, mistakes, successes and failures. I’m offering this advice so that other companies might not make the same mistakes. Without further ado:

1. If your website is built in php, do not pay $100+/month for a blog platform you cannot customize. Use WordPress. If you don’t know how to work with it, ask the guys that built your site.

And, we’re “go” for launch of Marketing Pilgim 2.0!

(If you’re reading this via RSS, you should click-thru to the site immediately and check out fresh new design).

I’m extremely excited with the new look for Marketing Pilgrim and with it comes a switch from Blogger to WordPress. While I’ve been a loyal supporter of Google’s Blogger; too much downtime, lack of plugins and an apparent move by Blogger to focus on the Blogspot community, made it an easy decision to make the switch.

Thanks to James Mathias of Onelotus Creative for bringing his expert design skills to the project. James was fantastic to work with, very patient and able to take my scrappy photoshop mock-up and turn it into a beautiful new blog.