According to the Q2 US Search Engine Performance Report, Google continues to dominate the paid search engine marketing industry. During the second quarter, Google was responsible for 77.4% of all US search marketing dollars spent. Yahoo was a very distant second with 17.8% of the market and MSN captured 4.8%. Despite their much smaller market shares, Yahoo and MSN still prove to be great advertising investments for many Internet marketers. The best strategy is to incorporate all three of the major search engines into your PPC marketing campaigns.

The number and quality of backlinks to your site has a huge impact on search engines’ view of your site quality. Thus, building quality backlinks should be an integral part of any SEO campaign. The search engines analyze all the links that they find pointing to your site. The quality of the site linking to you is considered, as is the relevancy of the site and the anchor text of the link.

Many webmasters make the mistake of trying to get as many sites as possible to link to their web page. When it comes to backlinks, more is better, but only if the links are from high quality and/or relevant sites. Links from well respected directories like DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory will increase the status of your site in the eyes of the search engines. If the search engine finds sites with similar content and theme linking to you, that is also a positive. These  links show the search engines that your site is respected enough to be linked to by others in your  industry/field.

In addition to watching which sites are linking back to you, it is also important to pay attention to the anchor text of the links. If you have a site about electronics reviews, a link on a site with the text Find HDTV Reviews Herewill be considered more favorably than a simple Click Here. Often times you have little to no control over the anchor text of links, but when you do (as in many directory submissions), be sure to make the most of it. Try to include your targeted keywords in the anchor text whenever possible.

If you work to build many high quality and relevant backlinks to your site, you will see your placement in the search results increase. Search engines work on algorithms and technology. Analyzing links to your site is one of the primary ways that they can determine what your site is about and for which visitors your content would be useful.

Stay tuned for a three-part series on methods and strategies of building backlinks to your site.

Twitter looks to be the next in a long list of social websites instituting ads to generate revenue. According to a recent Businessweek Article, the popular website may be in trouble. The first indication came back in April, when Japanese users of the site began to see a large banner ad on each user’s homepage. Earlier this month, U.S. users started to notice the effects of some cost saving efforts made by the company. A limit was created to allow users to “follow” no more than 2,000 people. Only a week later, Twitter imposed more cost-cutting by discontinuing mobile “SMS” delivery of tweets to phones outside of the US, Canada, and India.

Given these recent signs of pending financial trouble, it is likely that Twitter will begin to offer advertising on its other sites around the world. It’s hard to say how extensive the advertising will get, but they have to pay the bills somehow. While the ad-free environment has been nice, a change could create another great avenue for internet marketers to increase their reach.

If you’ve been following my blog, you may remember a piece that I wrote on a great piece of freeware called Xobni. The program is an addon for MS Outlook and makes finding emails much more efficient.  Since I first started using Xobni, another email addon has started gaining popularity, Xoopit.

While Xobni is great for users of Outlook, Xoopit is designed with millions of Gmail users in mind. The service adds a toolbar to the top of your Gmail inbox that lets you search your inbox for photos, videos, and files with the click of a button. Xoopit will also show you which people send you the most items in their emails.

The major concern with Xoopit is that you have to supply them with your email login information which causes concern for many people. I’m sure that the serivce is fully secure, but I still wouldn’t feel comfortable using it on an extremely important email account. If you’ve got a personal account or aren’t concerned by the security risks, it’s a fun email service to try out!

If you prefer Mozilla’s Firefox 3 brower to Internet Explorer, you are probably familiar with some of the many add-ins and extensions offered for the program. Mozilla recently finished up its Extend Firefox 3 contest and annouced the winning programs.

Three add-ins were awarded the grand prize. The first winner was Pencil, a tool for GUI prototyping and diagramming. The program is not likely to be very useful for most users, but it is a great tool for anyone needing to create a GUI prototype in short order.

The second winner was an addon called Tagmarks. The program adds a set of icons to your toolbar that makes it easy to create tags in your bookmarks. Tagmarks also allows you to save pages to your delicious bookmarks, as well as your  local ones.

The final grand prize winner was HandyTag. This little tool will automatically suggest tags for your bookmarks based on tags suggested by delicious users and through the use of its internal keyword extractor.

Given the popularity of the many web 2.0 sites, the fact that two of the three winners are tagging utilities is not a big suprise. There are many other useful addon programs for FireFox, so be sure to explore and have fun.

I want to thank all of you that follow our blog and website here at Profit Program Reviews. While we have not been posting new reviews as often as I would like to be, rest assured that they are coming. We have been working very hard behind the scenes on several site improvements that will hopefully be implemented in the next couple of weeks.

Some of these planned improvements include:

Better organization of the Affiliate Program Reviews section of the site

Improved affiliate links section including an extensive list of free and paid directories for you to submit your websites

Implementation of a user feedback method to allow for users to also submit their reviews and thoughts on products

In addition to these upgrades, we will be posting several new reviews over the next several days. If you have any requests or suggestions, please feel free to let us know.

If you use Google’s Adwords in your marketing strategy, you will likely notice some changes over coming weeks. The announced “tweaks” were made based, at least in part, on all the advertiser feedback Google has received from the program. This update will include three major changes:

Real Time Quality Score

Quality score was a concept introduced in 2005 in order to improve the quality of ads shown to Google users. Currently, Google utilizes a static per-keyword quality score. When you choose a keyword for your ad, Google calculates a quality score based on that keyword and it doesn’t change unless your ad changes. Going forward, there wiil be a system that evaluates an ad’s quality each time it matches a search query. This new system should help to increase the relavency of the ads shown which will benefit both users and advertisers.

Inactive For Search…Not Anymore

I’m sure you’ve had your fair share of keywords that show up as “inactive for search”. This happens as a result of a bid that is too low, given  your calculated quality score. Now that Google will be calculating quality scores with each search, your ad relivancy and quality score will change all the time. In reality, if your keyword is currently inactive, you are not likely to see a big increase in traffic due to this change.

Minimum Bid Gets Replaced

There will no longer be any minimum bids in Adwords. Google has decided to replace “minimum bid” with “first page bid”. This new amount will be of much more interest to marketers, as it is an estimate of the bid that it would take for your ad to reach the first page of search results. The first page bid amount will be based on the exact match version of the keyword, the ad’s quality score, and the amount of keyword competition.

Despite these changes, one thing remains very clear about Adwords. Quality Score matters! Be sure to take the time to research and optimize your ads for each campaign in order to keep your quality score higher, and your costs lower.

Hey everyone! I just wanted to give you all the heads up that Web CEO is offering some really great discounts on the paid versions of their products for another couple of days. Right now you can buy the SmallBiz Unleashed version for $159 + a $30 cash bonus or you can get the Professional Unleashed version for $269 + a $50 cash bonus. These prices are about 50% off regular price, so if you have been thinking about getting the program, do it now! Both of the paid versions also include the full SEO/SEM course from Web CEO University. This is a really great course for anyone who want to improve his or her online  marketing skills.

Read our Web CEO Review Here

If you are looking for a place to market your products to affiliate marketers, there is a new alternative to Clickbank. Click2Sell allows you to sell both digital and physical products and doesn’t charge any setup fees for merchants.

There are also some other key differences with Click2Sell. Fees range from $1 to $3 per transaction, compared to the percentage sale method that Clickbank uses. Click2Sell also provides merchants with much more control. Merchants have full control over refunds of their products and can even set up different commission rates for certain affiliates.

While the full control provided to merchants over refunds and payments to affiliates leaves room for dishonest merchants to take advantage, they have instituted a merchant rating system. For example, if a merchant does not pay commissions on time, its rating is lowered. There is even a “hall of shame” for the really bad merchants.

Click2Sell still has a ways to go, but it does offer many promising features. I’m not sure if the site will be able to maintain the integrity and trust that goes along with Clickbank or Commission Junction, but it’s possible that the rating system will work well enough to manage this task. Whether you are a merchant or an affiliate looking for products to sell, take a look at Click2Sell.

If you have a blog with traffic and are looking to start earning some money for your efforts, read our review of PayPerPost.com. It is a great service for connecting advertisers and bloggers together. Depending on the amount of traffic your blog generates, you could be earning hundreds of dollars a month, just for blogging!