Looks like Google made a change on how they display the average monthly searches per keyword in their Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Instead of giving you the exact average number of monthly searches they now give you a range. If you want more detailed information you actually have to set up a campaign:

It seems like unless you paying Google you will get less and less information from them moving forward.

The saying goes, “it’s impossible to manage what you can’t measure.” That is what keeps marketers and advertising agencies up at night, worrying whether their metrics are indeed reliable and if they actually validate the real value of their daily activities. Luckily, these hurdles are getting easier and easier to clear, thanks to the continuing innovations in software tools.

The biggest challenge now lies in comprehending the data collected and translating it into good, profitable decisions. With online marketing, an entrepreneur or marketer can measure the performance of their marketing efforts.

The early stages in the entrepreneurial startup lifecycle are tenuous times for everyone. It’s all too easy for inexperienced entrepreneurs to try to rush their progress and move quickly toward angel funding or first-round investment before they are really ready. In reality, a more measured and gradual approach in the early stages has a greater likelihood of attracting capital than the rush to get in front of potential investors with a slide deck.

Ever since you decided to start your own online business, you have been dreaming of the moment when money would start flowing and yet, despite the aggressive SEO campaigns that you put up, it is not happening.

That is because people nowadays want more than smart marketing strategies poured up their throat, they want viable brands, they want significant stories, they want to feel important. Therefore, in order to draw traffic to your site, to make people talk about you and to sell your products or services, you need a thorough reputation, you need to turn your site into a powerful brand that can take down any competitor.

That means starting everything with this purpose in mind, from choosing the products to promote to designing your site and promoting it. You need to follow the same line, to send the same message, to conquer your place in SERPs and on the social networks gradually but surely.

A lot of people consider blogging a waste of time and money. However, most SEO companies recommend blogs for their customers’ websites, claiming that they bring a lot of benefits.

To bring some light into the matter, lets remember what search engine optimization gurus claim that Google loves the most in ranking websites: backlinks and original content published on regular basis. As far as the content is concerned, blogging is certainly the best way to lure the spiders and to make them index your website.

However, if you build your blog posts around relevant keywords for you niche and you link those keywords to your homepage, you get contextual backlinks, and, indeed, the conclusion that blogging can be considered a contextual link building technique is correct.

In terms of backlinks, things seem a little more complicated due to the fact that there are several types of backlinks and it is hard to tell which type is more appreciated according to the Google algorithms. However, every backlink represents a step forward and blogging can bring you hundreds or thousands of inbound links.