May Blog Highlights: WordStream’s Best of the Month

The weather in Boston this month was really starting to get to me; it felt like most of May was rainy and unseasonably cool. But I went out of town for the long weekend and came back to the first sweltering weather of the year. We didn’t get back to our apartment till 1:30 a.m. on Sunday night, entirely exhausted, and we still installed our air conditioner right then because there was no way we were going to get to sleep in an 85-degree apartment.

So, yeah, it’s still technically spring, but nonetheless, I say welcome to summer!!

And now it’s time to kick back with an iced coffee in the cool breeze of the AC and enjoy our top 10 posts from the month of May:

1. Five Ways to Lower Your PPC Campaign’s Cost Per Action: Tom did a series of great posts this month on five ways to meet key PPC goals. This one outlines some ways to get your CPA down, including finding more specific keywords and analyzing your offer types.
2. AdWords Showing Display URL Domain in Headlines for Select Ads on Google: Google recently began displaying URL domains in the headline for top-ranking text ads, giving those advertisers some serious brand real estate. Learn what it looks like and what it could mean for you.
3. SEO Title Tags vs. Witty Headlines: Is There Room for Puns in Online News?: Writers and editors love to bitch and moan about how SEO killed the clever headline, but it doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. You can optimize a title and keep your precious pun.
4. Site Links to News Articles Replace Website Description in Branded News Searches: Larry caught Google testing a new SERP format for branded news-related searches. Instead of a meta description, some major news outlets get direct site links to stories.
5. Five Ways to Lower Your AdWords & PPC Costs: Another “five ways” post, this one focuses on lowering overall costs if you’re on a strict budget.
6. Keywords vs. Search Queries: What’s the Difference?: Aren’t keywords and search queries the same thing, you say? Nope, not quite. Here’s how to tell them apart in the wild.
7. Linkbait Case Study: How We Got on the Front Page of Mashable: We isolated three factors that got our recent infographic linkbait some coveted front-page links.
8. Infographic Marketing: An Interview with Brian Wallace of NowSourcing: Speaking of infographics: In this Q&A, I talked to infographic and social media expert Brian Wallace about the power of visual linkbait and how to leverage it successfully.
9. Osama Bin Laden’s Death as Told by Social Media and Search Engines: On May 1, the death of Osama bin Laden triggered a huge wave of activity on Google, Twitter and Facebook. Megan Marrs took a look at some of the trends.
10. Google Correlate: Google Trends in Reverse: An inside look at this new feature in Google Labs.

Stay cool and see you next month!

Image: Anna Hanks