Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Lynda.com actually has a great course about 6 hours long. It doesn't cover some of the new updates, BUT, it's a great fundamentals course with some advanced techniques.

You can find the course on Adwords here:

http://www.lynda.com/Google-AdWords-tutorials/Essential-Training/73287-2.html

Thank you!

Along these lines, we do a lot of internal linking from our blogs to other content on our website. Can this serve to hurt us in anyway?

Thank you both!

Hey There,

That's a pretty decent budget in my opinion. I know that some vendors can charge anywhere from 500 - 5K month depending on how robust a campaign you have.

When looking for a vendor I'd suggest to take a good look into:

(1) Reputation - How many clients do you they have and how long have they been around? What type of results have they seen?

(2) Processes - How do they go about analyzing your PPC efforts. Will it align with how you envision your campaigns to operate?

(3) Relationship - Can you depend on them with unlimited consultative services. What I mean by this is, are they going to be available answer the majority of your questions, or will they file you in order of importance in comparison to their other clients

(4) Knowledge - Make sure they know their stuff! You'd be surprised how many Internet Marketing/Web Development companies advertise PPC services just because they know it's hot and do not have too much experience. Not that this is a bad thing per se (of course we all gotta start somewhere!), but, depending on your goals and budget, make sure you are truly getting what you paid for.

One vendor that I've had some pretty positive experience with is a company called Web Mechanix. I did some work with them at my old employer and they were pretty on point. Check them out at www.webmechanix.com

Good luck!

Hi Fellow Mozzers,

Just started off here on seomoz.org and am super happy to have joined the community! I've recently started a new job as web optimization manager for an education company. There is a lot to do and one of my first tasks is to figure a better strategy for our current blog.

I've convinced our management to move our blog from topic.domain.com to domain.com/blog. My research has shown that this is a better strategy so that our blog can receive the DA of our root domain, get more people to click through our site, and even receive more natural searches (PLEASE, someone correct me if I'm wrong on this).

Anyway, our blog is currently hosted as a Wordpress blog and we're wondering if it's more worthwhile to build a blog platform ourselves or continue using Wordpress. I am not a technical guy and don't know the backend stuff to make it happen, but my concern is primarily for the optimum search capacity. Also, our bloggers frequently put links to different portions of our website - does this hold any negative  SEO value in terms of too much internal linking? I personally wouldn't assume so, but then again I could be wrong. Finally, we also track our main website using Google Analytics- currently, the only tracking we have installed on our blogs is the default provided by Wordpress (yes yes I know, but that's why i'm here -- to fix these weaknesses). I'm assuming we will be able to better track using GA when the switch is made.

So, I guess my questions are:

(1) Is my research correct in that it's better to have our blog hosted as domain.com/blog over topic.domain.com

(2) Are there any best practices in making this switch and/or any negative implications with continuing to use Wordpress or should we build our own platform (we have the internal resources to do so, but would prefer to take the easiest and best route in terms of SEO and community building).

(3) Will it still be just as easy to track using GA.

Thank you!!

Pedram