Jennifer Slegg began as a freelance writer, and turned to search engine optimization and writing content for the web in 1998. She has created numerous content-rich sites in niche markets and works with many clients on content creation, strategy, and monetization. She writes about many search industry and social media topics on her blog, JenniferSlegg.com and is a frequent speaker at search industry conferences on SEO, content marketing and content monetization. Acknowledged as the leading expert on the Google AdSense contextual advertising program, she runs JenSense, a blog dealing exclusively with contextual advertising. She is known by many as her handle Jenstar on various webmaster forums.
When searching for local businesses, 85 percent of consumers say they read online reviews. And many people go beyond the first review – 60 percent read between two and six online reviews to help form an opinion, according to a new BrightLocal survey.
If you've had problems integrating your Google AdWords and Google Analytics accounts together, you're in luck. Google is offering better support in order for advertisers and users of Google Analytics to link their accounts together.
The FTC has released new guidelines for the search engine industry and how it distinguishes between advertising and natural search results. Particularly, the FTC believes that it has become harder for consumers to recognize paid search results.
One of the lesser-known tools used by searchers on Google has been the tilde sign (~) operator. Citing low usage, Google has confirmed it has dropped support for the tilde, which would also include synonyms for a keyword in the search results.
Google has launched its dynamic remarketing program to all clients with a Google Merchant Center account. This pilot program is only available to those in the travel and education sectors, but Google does plan to expand later this year.
Google now lets advertisers specify, or nominate, the specific text they would like to appear for their sitelink descriptions. This allows advertisers to be specific about what text they would like to appear on their enhanced advertisements.
Google has updated their rankings help article to state that you can improve your rankings by "creating high-quality sites." Google previously said the key to higher rankings was "increasing the number of high-quality sites" linking to your site.
When a user searches for a local results on Google, such as a restaurant or hotel, there is now a horizontal carousel which features thumbnails, ratings, as well as the number of Google+ reviews. Users can then scroll sideways to see more results.
Since the PRISM news broke, nearly every day has been a record search day for DuckDuckGo, including Monday, June 17, where it broke 3 million searches for the first time. That is nearly double its pre-PRISM daily search totals.
Not surprisingly, Google led the way for search share in May, and grew its U.S. search market share to 66.7 percent. Bing grew to 17.4 percent in May, a significant increase from its 15.4 percent search market share in May 2012.
Using stock photography versus original photography won't cause any negative impact on your site's search engine rankings. However, one caveat Matt Cutts does ponder if Google could somehow used this as a signal in future search quality rankings.
Good news for webmasters who have been struggling to identify links and pages that have been trigger warnings in Google Webmaster Tools. Google will now include example URLs in their emails warning webmasters about manual spam actions.
Technology is changing the way users are searching and interacting with technology. Bing Ads Evangelist John Gagnon shares some unique patterns, strategies and techniques that can help you interpret big data to make smarter marketing decisions.
The information is basic, and is the same information that business users have had for some time. But for smaller businesses and marketers, having this information at a glance is helpful without having to resort to a third party tool.
AdWords is expanding their reach with the search results ads by now allowing advertisers to use image extensions with their ads so that images may show up along with the AdWords ads. It's beta, and is officially called the image extensions beta.
Are algorithmic updates created solely to force webmasters to buy ads and increase Google's bottom line? While it's no conspiracy that Google wants to make profits, Google's Matt Cutts says updates are only designed to improve the user experience.
Google has announced two new structured data features. Google has updated the Data Highlighter, which now covers eight types of structured data. Also, the new Structured Data Markup Helper is designed to help guide webmasters with HTML coding.
Google has launched a new nutrition search that provides accurate and up to date information on a wide variety of food and drinks, such as how much protein, carbs, sodium, and other nutritional values are in the product.
The Doodle features six Petri dishes in the Google colors. When you click for the animation, you see a hand swapping each dish, and then watch as the bacteria grows in each one. Then you can mouseover to see what was cultured in each Petri dish.
Advertorials have been popping up on websites more frequently over the past year or two. Google could penalize your site if you don't make a proper disclosure. Here are the guidelines webmasters need to know for advertorials and native advertising.