IndustrySearch Week in Review for Oct. 30, 2010

Search Week in Review for Oct. 30, 2010

Here’s a roundup of this week’s columns and news stories for the week of Oct. 25 to 29, as reported by Search Engine Watch, as well as search news and tips from around the web.

SEM Basics

Organic Search Listings That Drive Clicks by John Greer
People scan search results quickly. Here’s how to make your listing stand out and make searchers want to click on your site.

Search Engine Optimization

Hacking AdWords – Who Said Black Hat Was Just Organic? by Gary-Adam Shannon
Drugs. Viagra. Online casinos. Yes, even AdWords isn’t impervious to black hat techniques.

Search Advertising

Click Fraud Rising – Should You Be Concerned? by Melissa Mackey
Lost revenue from click fraud can be minimized. Here’s what search advertisers can do to avoid wasting budget.

Can Microsoft adCenter Pose a Threat to Google AdWords? by Jonathan Allen
Industry experts from enterprise search marketing agencies offer insight into what advertisers can expect to squeeze out of adCenter.

Secrets to Paid Search Success Revealed, Part 1 by Ryan Woolley
Ads designed to be more attractive to a searcher and more relevant to the search query can yield wildly profitable paid search campaigns.

3 Holiday PPC Tips for Black Friday (And Beyond) by Alex Cohen
Fine-tuning your text ad to answer the questions of shoppers is what will set you apart this holiday season. These tips will help you increase your relevance, improve click-through rate, and answer the most profitable holiday questions.

RIP: AdWords Report Center By Greg Habermann
If you spend any amount of time in Google AdWords, you’ve probably noticed that your report options have slowly been dissappearing from the Report Center.

Impact of Google Instant on Paid Search [Report] By Jonathan Allen
Marin Software unveiled key research showing that Google Instant streaming search results was a win-win implementations for users and advertisers… and Google.

Microsoft adCenter Powers All Paid Search Advertising on Bing / Yahoo Search Alliance in U.S. & Canada By Jonathan Allen
Yahoo and Microsoft announced that they have completed a major search alliance milestone in both the U.S. and Canada.

Analytics & ROI

Social Media Marketing

Happy Halloween! Is Mark Zuckerburg Dressing Up as Steve Jobs? By Jonathan Allen
I feel like I am writing for the wrong blog when I say this, but did anyone notice Mark Zuckerburg’s resemblance to Steve Jobs at the Bing-Facebook announcement?

Link Building

How to Value Links? by Jeremy Bencken
Perhaps the hardest question to answer in search engine optimization is how much to budget for link building. Here’s how you can establish a fair ROI for link building.

Incorporating Geo-Targeting into Your Link Building by Jennifer Van Iderstyne
Searchers are getting better all the time at incorporating specific locations into their queries. Ignoring that fact is just fatal. Here are a few simple things you can do to amp up the geo-targeting as you build links.

How to Find Safe, Valuable, and Scalable Link Building Opportunities by Garrett French
A guide for finding trustworthy links that drive the right traffic to your site.

Local & Mobile Search

What Local-Mobile-Social Convergence Means to Your Business by Jon Schepke
Marketers need to optimize, distribute, and track content across all platforms. Here are some strategies and tools for success as local, mobile, and social continue to converge

Google Place Search: Location Information Just Became More Critical by Jon Schepke
Google’s new Place Search makes it more important than ever for business to implement a local search, online review, and SEO strategy to achieve prominent visibility in Google’s results.

The Future of Visual Search: UPCs, QR Codes, and Augmented Reality by Michael Boland
Combined with general mobile device evolution and penetration, the pieces are falling into place for an all-out mobile barcode revolution in the coming months.

Welcome to Google Places Search By Greg Habermann
This is a major change in how local is going to shape the future of search. You can compare those SERP’s to the current version to see how things are going to be changing monumentally.

Google Launches New Ad Format for Local Businesses By Danny Goodwin
Local businesses in San Francisco, Houston, and Chicago, can now access Google Boost, a beta AdWords program that auto-generates search ads to appear in Google’s sponsored links section and Google Maps search results pages.

Google Instant Arriving on Android Devices By Danny Goodwin
Owners of select Android devices, including Droid, Droid X, and Incredible, are reporting the arrival of Google Instant (beta).

SMB Search Marketing

Preparing Your Small Business Site For SEO by Rob Chant
A starter guide for small business owners who are launching a brand new site and approaching search engine optimization for the first time.

Small Business Search Advertising Spend Growth Slows in Q3; Bing Share Rises [Report] By Danny Goodwin
Small businesses on average spent $2,327 on paid search advertising in Q3 2010, an increase of 43 percent over Q3 2009, according to Webvisible.

International Search

Yandex Adding Facebook Updates to Search Index by Danny Goodwin
Russia’s top search engine Yandex will begin integrating Facebook data into its index, the companies announced.

Google Settles AdWords Discrimination Complaint in France By Danny Goodwin
Google has settled with French authorities, promising to overhaul its rules on blocking certain advertisers from buying sponsored links.

AdWords Seller Ratings – U.K. Seeing Stars By Danny Goodwin
Google introduced its AdWords seller ratings feature in the U.S. in June. As of Sunday, it appears the U.K. is now getting this service as well on Google.co.uk.

The Search Industry

Alternative Search Engines Marketers Should Pay Attention To by Bas van den Beld
You won’t find these search engines in the search market share lists alongside Google, Bing, and Yahoo, but they see lots of traffic and offer opportunities for all search marketers.

Google News

Google Profiled Tonight on ‘Bloomberg Game Changers’ By Danny Goodwin
Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be profiled in “Bloomberg Game Changers,” a new documentary series that focuses on some of today’s most influential people.

Could Google Acquisition of ITA Kill Online Travel Sales Industry By Frank Watson
Seems many of the larger online travel sales sites fear Google’s purchase of ITA – the technology behind 65% of all carrier-direct online flight searches in the U.S. – and have banded together to try and stop the sale.

Google Promotes Susan Wojcicki to Senior VP By Danny Goodwin
Google has promoted Susan Wojcicki from vice president of product management to senior vice president. Wojcicki, Google’s 18th employee, will continue her duties, overseeing Google AdWords, AdSense and Analytics.

U.S. Ends Google Street View Inquiry By Danny Goodwin
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has ended its inquiry into Google’s wireless data grab, saying that the company has added better privacy controls into its corporate structure.

Meet Google’s new VP of Search By Greg Habermann
Coming to Google from Amazon/A9 four years ago he has over 20 years of experience in the world of search having been chief scientist at Yahoo and a professor at the University of Arizona. He is well published and well respected by his colleagues.

Class Action Suit Targets Google for Revealing Users Search Queries By Danny Goodwin
A federal lawsuit filed in California alleges that Google illegally shared the search queries of its users with third parties. The class action seeks “monetary relief for those whose search queries were wrongly shared, and injunctive relief to prevent continued privacy abuses.”

Schmidt’s Solution to Street View Privacy Concerns? ‘Just Move’ By Danny Goodwin
During the past seven days, five countries have complained about Google’s Street View cars. The growing outcry over privacy prompted Google to post another apology on their blog, which laid out new “privacy controls” to avoid future privacy breaches.

Google Fights Back in Patent Suit vs. Microsoft Co-Founder By Danny Goodwin
Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, sued 11 corporations, including Google/YouTube, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, and AOL, claiming they built their businesses off of technology he owns the patents on. Now Google and many of the other companies are fighting back.

Google Sites Account for 6.4% of All Global Internet Traffic by Danny Goodwin
Google is huge, and it continues to shatter records. This month, Google broke an Internet traffic record, and the search giant now represents about 6.4 percent of all global Internet traffic.

Bing News

Some Bing Users Seeing Integrated Facebook Search Results By Danny Goodwin
The Bing-Facebook personalized search results are beginning to roll out. Some Bing users who are signed into Facebook are starting to see their Facebook profile pop up in the top right corner, along with an message: “Hi X, Bing just got better with your Facebook friends.”

Yahoo News

Yahoo Appoints Ross Levinsohn as New EVP of Americas By Greg Habermann

Online Video News

Only 13% of Visitors to Media Company Homepage Watch Pre-roll Video Ads By Jonathan Allen
Video Sharing Analytics company, Tube Mogul conducted a little investigation to discover “what percent of unique visitors to a media company’s homepage will end up watching a pre-roll video ad?”

Have Tea Party Candidates Read Obama Playbook on Using YouTube for Campaigns? By Greg Jarboe
The tea party movement seems more engaged in both the online as well as the offline political process.

SES Conference & Expo

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Resources

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