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Or that they're terrorists!

In the SEOmoz dashboard context, it means a domain and a collection of keywords. I suspect they decided to set the tool up this way and needed a label for this function, and chose this word because it seemed suitable.

Sometimes you can get 70 characters to show on the SERP, but sometimes it's less. As far as I know, 60 is still the safest threshold.

Are you ensuring that your title tags come in under 60 characters? They seem to be rewriting the long ones more often.

This is an advantage of being in-house, I think. When our buyers add new product lines, the spreadsheet of products goes through me and I give the names and descriptions a once-over to make sure they seem sensible and searchable. It's very rare that I actually take the time to optimize title tags -- really only on high-margin items with potentially high search volume. Then the products are uploaded and it's right from the start. As for going back to optimize products that have already been uploaded, that's a daunting task when you're staring down thousands of products. I'd only prioritize that if the product pages aren't getting any traffic whatsoever.

You can't control this, I don't think. Google seems to think Keyword - Website Name is better for searchers.

That's exactly the model I was thinking of. The mouseover effect is a bit gaudy for my taste ...

It has nothing to do with SEO. It's not a bad idea to own them and redirect them to prevent competitors or even other non-competing companies from getting traffic that should be going to you, but if it's not in your budget, don't stress.

My understanding is that it disregards punctuation altogether.

Burrrrrrned.

As an additional tip, you can use a service like Copyscape to verify whether or not the content has been posted elsewhere online.

I don't think there's any maximum limit, unless the page gets so long that load time is impacted. If we're talking thousands of words, you might want to paginate.

I also don't believe there's a hard-and-fast minimum, but you need enough text for Google to understand what the page is about, and to make sure it's distinct from other pages on your site and doesn't get interpreted as a duplicate page. A few hundred words is a nice target, because that gives you room to repeat your keyword(s) a few times and include a few variations and some longtail bait, but 100 words might be enough.

Can it? Yes, of course. Should it? No. Searchers are being trained to expect that the authorship snippets mean articles and blog posts. If that's what they're expecting when they click on the search result, and instead they end up on a product page on an e-commerce site, they will leave. Save authorship markup for your informational content.

Because you only pay if they click. There's no reason not to target anything you think could convert.

How do you determine which revenue is directly attributable to AdWords?

Do you rely on AdWords' cost per conversion numbers?

I'm looking to compare spend to revenue from transactions that are directly attributable to that spend. So if I know how much I spent between Oct 1 and Oct 31, I want to know how much revenue resulted from those clicks. Not how many transactions occurred during that period, since that might include clicks from before Oct 1.

The problem is, AdWords includes conversions where the paid click might not actually be responsible for the transaction. If someone searches [red widgets], clicks an ad, comes to our website, leaves without purchasing, searches [blue widgets], clicks an organic result, and purchases, Analytics will correctly attribute that sale to organic. AdWords, however, will include that conversion in its cost/conv metric. Skewing the cost/conv number lower, I might add.

I've spoken with several AdWords/Analytics googlers about this, and they don't seem to know of a report that does what I want. I guess I'm wondering if others are trying to measure the same thing, or if they're comfortable with the less precise AdWords-supplied cost/conv figures.

How much branded traffic are you getting right now? My guess is, Google still needs to learn that your site is what searchers overwhelmingly want when they search [consumerbase] or [consumerbase.com]. Maybe there's a threshold for branded clicks before the algorithm becomes confident about that.

Oh, I thought you were talking about the companies in your screenshot. Are you searching [consumerbase.com]? I see what you mean now about the small sitelinks. I'm not sure why Google isn't treating that as a normal branded search.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the obvious: The Google AdWords keyword tool assesses competition based on AdWords, not based on SEO. A high competition keyword is a keyword that many advertisers are bidding on. It's common practice in AdWords to bid on low-volume high-conversion keywords. Those can actually get you the best ROI sometimes.