The history of web analytics has read a bit like the quest for the Holy Grail. An aggressive push to drive short-term conversion, including the pricing scenario above, could also lead to a drop in long-term revenue and customer loyalty. If you offer a sweetheart deal that pulls in new customers, it’s possible that they’ll take advantage of that deal and disappear forever. Today’s Conversion Rate gain, if it’s driven by bargain hunters or impulse buyers, could be next month’s Conversion disaster.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/when-conversion-rate-isnt-enough

In competitive markets, particularly, there will be key phrases that SEO teams will be expected to show progress towards gaining rankings for. Making search engine visibility a targeted metric provides a way for the SEO team to focus on the overall performance of the site in question. There are, however, two problems to solve with search engine visibility as a metric, the measurement of rankings and choice of keywords to be monitored.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/kpis-and-monthly-objective-metrics-for-people-who-do-seo

A new argument to prevent your competition from buying sponsored search listings, containing your brand, is playing out right now in a Wisconsin court room. Habush, Habush & Rottier claims that competing law firm Cannon & Dunphy violated state privacy laws by buying search ads using the keywords “Habush” and “Rottier.” As attorneys they likely knew that they wouldn’t win a trademark infringement claim, so they’re taking this novel approach.

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/03/buying-your-competitors-keywords-an-invasion-of-privacy.html

Google’s already made big waves in the international arena this year by deciding to pull out of China after too many censorship demands and a cyber attack targeting human rights activitists’ email accounts. And now another Asian country might get the same kind of press: Vietnam. The Vietnamese cyber attacks were “not especially sophisticated,” Google said, but like the Chinese attacks, they seemed to target dissidents and opponents to the government. Rather than hacking email accounts, this attack used malware to exploit software that enables Vietnamese users to run windows in their native language.
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/03/google-cyber-attacks-on-dissidents-spread-to-vietnam.html

Search is what you want right now. Search is watching, listening, and talking. Search isn’t just for text anymore; keeping an eye on the latest trends in this ever-changing field (and truly understanding those trends) is your key to the intent-driving kingdom. Naturally, the first people to capitalize on real-time search marketing have been the ones who know how to exploit it. With a hashtag (#) and a dream, anyone can pop into search results.
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/26174.asp

A critical part of managing your brand’s reputation is monitoring for negative publicity that can be easily found on the web. This concept extends beyond basic alignment of online tactics and messaging with traditional, or “offline,” reputation management strategies. Like any SEO effort, protecting a brand’s online reputation takes time; but the rewards can be more than worth the wait. Although SEO efforts won’t take care of immediate issues a marketer faces when combating a reputation crisis, a sustainable yet adaptable SEO program is a marketer’s best proactive strategy for nurturing their brand online on an ongoing basis.
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/26297.asp

In a sign of continued trimming at Yahoo, the company has announced that it’s closing the Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) — Yahoo’s counterpart to Google’s Adsense — as of April 30. YPN was launched about five years ago, but never formally advanced beyond the “beta” label. Yahoo is sending out an email today to members of the Publisher Network, and that email recommends users switch to the Chitika ad network, which has already set up a welcome page for YPN members.
http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-shutters-its-publisher-network-39108

Bing Maps is keeping busy at the Where 2.0 conference today, making several announcements and product rollouts. Here’s a rundown of those announcements, and links to the Bing Maps blog posts will be at the end. First up is the Bing Maps World Tour, which shows all of the imagery updates that Bing Maps has pushed out going back to August 2009. Second is news that Bing Maps has added a application called Oodle Rentals, which shows rental properties around the U.S. And last is the rollout of “foursquare Everywhere,” another new Bing Maps application.
http://searchengineland.com/bing-maps-announcements-at-where-2-0-39132

An investment firm that was founded in 1895 and earned almost $470 million in net revenue last year thinks it’s likely that Apple will build its own search engine. Analyst Gene Munster stated, “We believe Apple could utilize data unavailable to Google, data generated by the company’s App Store, to create a mobile centric search engine, which would be a unique offering to Google’s search engine.”
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/03/30/analyst-bets-apple-search-engine-might-be-on-the-way

Google is on the record as saying that site performance is a key factor in both organic and paid search results. The other search engines might be doing the same thing. So, if your site has always been a little sluggish during peak times, or just a bit pokey all the time, it might be hurting you in ways that you don’t realize. It’s always been true that a slow-loading site can hurt your organic search results. Sites that load more slowly aren’t crawled as often or as deeply.
http://www.searchengineguide.com/mike-moran/google-wants-you-to-speed-up-your-server.php

Ad verification is one of the hottest new areas of advertising. Starting last year, with an article in The Wall Street Journal about so called “invisible ads,” a number of companies have sprung up to audit and sometimes police display-advertising campaigns. There are many potential issues with online display advertising, but a few bad apples should not be allowed to spoil the entire market. Ad verification services have the potential to catch and correct these issues, and to give marketers the trust, transparency, and faith in display’s effectiveness necessary to bring more dollars into the industry.
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/26334.asp

In many ways, being an in-house SEO is like working on your own site. If the company website is static, then it’s a really good idea to add a blog so that you have an easy way of adding fresh content on a regular basis. Creating sites that provide links back to your main website is a great idea for many reasons. Out of this you get backlinks, traffic, and you create a wider net to draw more traffic. Starting a forum for people who’d like to discuss ideas or anything about your niche can be a superb traffic-creation plan.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/boost-your-seo-efforts-with-effective-traffic-getting-strategies/19465/

H1 tag should not be in the “head” of the document (despite H1 meaning “heading 1″). The <head> tag is only for content that doesn’t directly appear on the page like <title> (page title in browser title bar), meta tags, scripts and stylesheets.
http://www.bing.com/community/forums/t/658395.aspx

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…” This famous opening line from A Tale of Two Cities accurately describes the life of two keywords that reside in two very different countries (paid search campaigns). These two keywords were identical twins separated at birth. One keyword moved to Country A, which followed the law of last click attribution. The other keyword moved to Country B, where they followed the law of attribution management.
http://searchengineland.com/valuing-keywords-based-on-their-role-in-conversion-37364

The first step in ROI or ROAS (return on ad spend) optimization is to define the ROI goal. It will become abundantly clear which terms are ROI profitable versus which are ROI negative. Subsequently, as optimizers, we can try to make ROI negative terms profitable and if unsuccessful remove them. With an ROI goal set, we can manage individual keywords, keyword clusters, and the entire account to a goal ROI using basic logic.
http://searchengineland.com/cpa-vs-roi-optimization-what%E2%80%99s-the-best-practice-38818

Tests have shown that Google indexes all of the title tags (up to hundreds of characters) but only displays about 65 characters, so best practice is to keep it at this. Meta description won’t help with rankings but will increase your CTR. Keep it to about 150 characters.
http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/what-is-the-limit-for-keywords-in-meta-310342.html

For many, Page 1 in search has become the new holy grail of business owners and SEO practitioners alike. Of course, nothing can guarantee you will be on Page 1 of search. That being said, as part of a broader online marketing strategy, news releases can be an effective tool to facilitate the outward expression of news and information about a business, which over time can result in the creation of online authority in the eyes of search engines.
http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/03/news-blended-search/

The thing that closes the sale is making your product valuable, and this can definitely be said about links. The link you want to place has to be a valuable to the website owner and their visitors. So if you have the option to add a description to your link, make sure the description is something that is enticing to the website’s visitors.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/pitching-link-requests-one-size-doesnt-fit-all/19457/

It’s fair to say that most of us are running Google Analytics on at least a few of the sites we deal with. Market share for Google’s traffic tracking platform was estimated last year around 75-80% in a few separate studies. But from an SEO standpoint Google Analytics definitely leaves some things to be desired. Luckily there are plenty of clever SEOs out there who take on complicated and difficult projects that make our lives easier.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/5-handy-seo-hacks-for-google-analytics/19462/

OpenSocial is based on the common technologies that make the web work – HTTP, HTML and XML, RESTful APIs – which means the barrier-to-entry for most developers is a lot lower. Lots of smart people, from smart companies, are driving OpenSocial forward – from Google to Cisco, with all shapes and sizes of companies in between. Selecting OpenSocial gave us access to this pool of innovators, and meant we could invest our innovation energy in other places.
http://www.techcrunchit.com/2010/03/24/five-reasons-opensocial-will-change-the-enterprise/

Google is about to announce some sort of new partnership involving its Chrome browser and Adobe’s Flash platform, CNET reported earlier today as a rumor. Something else interesting: Google offering more Flash-support would seem to go against its very public support of the HTML5 standard. Just about every new project Google launches these days, from Wave to Buzz, pushes HTML5 in some way. And a big part of HTML5 is the video component, which will allow users to play web videos without requiring a plug-in like Flash.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/29/google-flash-apple/

The Google blog posted their weekly, “this week in search” announcing small but important changes released on Google search. They include expanding the search suggestions user interface internationally, adding more language support to real-time search, adding refinements to local search queries and introducing lists for bookmarks.
http://searchengineland.com/google-expands-suggest-real-time-38918

The AdWords reseller program has been used by local media companies and several independent sales channels to help sell search marketing to small businesses in the local market. Conceptually it was a win-win for Google and its local media partners; however in practice it hasn’t worked out quite as well as hoped.
http://searchengineland.com/sources-google-terminating-adwords-reseller-program-for-now-38955

You can thank the iPhone for leading the charge when it comes to a massive deluge of new mobile Internet traffic. Smartphone data traffic grew 193 percent year-over-year in the month of February, with Apple dominating the market but Android making its presence felt slowly but surely, according to a report from AdMob.
http://www.internetnews.com/mobility/article.php/3873091/Mobile+Data+Traffic+Swells+193.htm

Even with numerous high-speed providers and the promise of billions of dollars for broadband from the U.S. government, Google’s proposal to get into the high-speed Internet business has proven exceptionally popular. The reason for the massive response in Google’s broadband networks — some communities have even renamed themselves to attract the search giant’s interest, and there have been numerous YouTube pitches — is easy to understand. Google said the small number of ultra high-speed networks in the U.S. will deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today, with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections.
http://www.internetnews.com/infra/article.php/3873266/Google+HighSpeed+Fiber+Offer+Proves+Popular.htm

According to a forum post, one of the oldest and still one of the most important tip in SEO is link exchange. It can raise your PR a lot and still bring good, direct visitors.
http://www.submitexpress.com/bbs/about89984.html&sid=0c2566f8e90602da8899c21a0771ac94

B2B branding through thought leadership is not as easily quantifiable as other marketing efforts. And investments in reputation building might not pay off as immediately as pay-per-click or email marketing. But building a recognizable B2B brand pays off in the form of long-term increased referrals, positive brand conversations on both digital and in-person channels, web traffic and sales.
http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/03/b2b-branding-tips/

If you get an email entitled You’r adds have stopped working! from lperez_bt@adwords.com, do not open it because it is not an email from Google AdWords. The word “AdWords Site” is linked to a false Google AdWords login page. If you are tricked and login in with private Adwords login data, your company’s security will be comprised. The title “You’r adds have stopped working!” should be an indicator that this is a fake email, but it’s very easy to misread this, especially on a Smart Phone.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/warning-fake-google-adwords-phishing-campaign/19391/

Many small businesses are using Wordpress as a CMS for their website, and understanding the traffic that comes from the Local business center is uber important. There are all types of complimentary dishes that you can add within analytics for detailed reporting. If you are looking for some more information, then Martijn Beijk was one of the first to really lay out the blueprints for local analytics tracking on Mike Blumenthal’s blog.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/local-search-recipe-how-to-track-local-analytics-with-wordpress%E2%80%A6and-make-pies/19241/

All those search engines automatically suggest things to search for, as you begin typing. The suggestions come from looking at their records of popular searches that are being done by millions of people. By the way, people searching for the things that Facebook causes has reached a new high, at least according to Google Trends.
http://searchengineland.com/the-things-facebook-causes-according-to-google-yahoo-bing-38837

It’s common for searchers to do a search, click on a result, then go back to the results page and select another listing or do a new search. Now Google’s fighting this “pogosticking” behavior, as it is known, with a new feature – “Get More” links that appear when a searcher comes back to the results page.
http://searchengineland.com/google-fights-%E2%80%9Cpogostick-seachers%E2%80%9D-with-new-%E2%80%9Cget-more%E2%80%9D-option-38847

According to an article this morning in the Los Angeles Times, Google has added Twitter search results to its search engine there, “in effect, lifting a nine-month blackout of the microblogging service in China.” Earlier this week, Google announced that it would stop censoring search results and would redirect visitors from mainland China to Google.com.hk from Google.cn. Already, China has worked to censor search results provided on Google.com.hk.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_brings_twitter_search_results_to_china.php

Clearly, Google feels they need to provide real-time search to improve the relevancy of its results for breaking news, topical stories/events, and popular queries. Real-time search isn’t popular with everyone. Many SEO experts have complained that it values quantity over quality — just be the most recent person to Tweet around an issue if you want to secure a top listing in the search results.
http://searchenginewatch.com/3639891

You can get backlinks using  Link Collector sites. It’s a site that gathers in content from various sources and posts links TO them. The easiest way to visualize this is to think of them as niche-specific mini-Twitters posting snippets and links to certain topically relevant articles. Another way to think of this is having a Search Engine News Site posting SEO articles aggregated from myriad sources.
http://www.seo-scoop.com/2010/03/15/link-collector-scraper/

Links are the lifeblood of the web. Without fresh links, your website has no authority in the engines or consistent referral traffic. Some companies and individuals appear to attract links without really trying. Others struggle and never break through to the point of building links at increasing velocity. The rise of the social web has set the idea of personal branding on fire.
http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/03/link-magnet-ses-ny-2010/

Conversion rate optimization is “everywhere” these days, from Twitter, to publications, to conferences and beyond. But while it’s gaining steam in the industry, it’s still a relatively new initiative for many marketers. Conversion optimization, often referred to as landing page optimization, is best defined as the on-going process of refininig and testing the post-click experience to optimize for conversion goals. It can be anything from testing a microsite against a landing page, to testing hero shots within an experience, to optimizing shopping cart forms.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/3-best-practices-of-conversion-rate-optimization/18384/

Interlinking your sub pages is a great way to both improve your rankings by using keyword-targeted anchor texts and also increase the crawl rate and depth (as well as click-through). While linking to your older articles when writing the post manually is a must, taking advantage of some smart automation is also a good idea.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-smartly-interlink-your-blog-content-with-seo-smart-links/19098/

Despite all the attention social media is getting, social media marketing budgets are still virtually insignificant compared to those for search engine optimization and paid search. 73% of companies had a budget of less than $25,000 for social media marketing in 2009, including 23% who said their budget for Facebook, Twitter and other social media darlings was zero.

http://searchengineland.com/the-state-of-search-engine-marketing-2010-38826

Microsoft sees an opening in several areas and it’s seeking to create a highly differentiated experience vs. Google, not only around the UI but in terms of how it surfaces content. In the maps area the company is doing some very “cool” stuff in particular. And of course there’s more discussion of the new features on Techmeme.
http://searchengineland.com/microsoft-rolling-out-raft-of-new-bing-features-better-search-intent-more-answers-more-real-time-data-38760

Getting high page rank is something different than SEO on page optimization , what you have done about changes metas or submitting sitemap. The quality backlinks and the more traffic attract a good page rank when Google updates. So try to get some relevant back-links from high authority sites and also do work out on getting higher traffic from various sources available on web like social media. I must say, higher traffic gives much important to a site interms of gettign high page rank and top ranking as well.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1743157

Google is crawling business profiles on Foursquare and using them as citations in Google Maps. They’re not, however, crawling Gowalla business profiles. There’s a lot of buzz about the power of Foursquare to promote your business as a word-of-mouth tool. It’s essentially a location-based game that rewards individuals who consistently visit locations (businesses, landmarks, you name it).
http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/google-crawling-foursquare-for-local-citations/2951/

SEO continues to rapidly evolve, and with it so do bad SEO ideas. Focusing on keyword meta tags, keyword stuffing, and hoarding PageRank are some of the bad SEO oldies but goodies. Unfortunately, SEO is an area that remains little understood by the general populace. Those people who begin to learn a little bit about it can become really dangerous to themselves or, if they become SEO consultants, harmful to their clients. The only defense against this is education.
http://searchenginewatch.com/3639869

In WordPress, you should have unique title tags. This helps not only your SEO (Google, for example recommends the use of unique title tags), but your website readers/users as well. When every post title is unique, you can use this input to your PDF creator script to properly grab the correct post content from the MySQL database. But first, you need to have a correct title tag in your WordPress blog. Some plug-ins can do this job, but the recommended way is by using a PHP script (no plug-ins for simplicity).
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/Adding-PDF-Conversion-to-Your-WordPress-Website/

The rising importance of optimizing one’s digital assets came out of Google and other search engines’ decision to start including information and file types from other sources that their main search index. Some queries trigger search results that go beyond web pages, MS Office docs and PDF files to include images, blog posts, news, video thumbnails, books and others. Most companies are not wired to create the variety of content that can achieve top visibility on search engines. In most cases, search engine optimization efforts are focused on content and digital assets that are currently in place.
http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/03/content-marketing-strategy-dao/

Prior to drafting a release, you need to understand what your audience is demanding. Meeting audience demand is integral to accomplishing your press release visibility objectives. By keeping your keywords and topics focused, your release can rank better in search engines and resonate more with media. Images can increase the click through rate on releases in both regular and news search by 15 – 25%. By using video in news releases, we have seen up to a 500% increase in time on pages.  As the web shifts to a rich media experience, bloggers, media and end users are becoming more accustomed to video.

http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/03/press-release-seo-tips-ses/

As Twitter results become increasingly commonplace on search engine result pages, there’s no time like the present for in-house marketers to help spice up unpaid search efforts with some Twitter action. There are lots of wonderful branding and customer communication benefits to Twitter that make it a worthwhile addition to any marketer’s efforts, but here the focus is on the greatest benefit Twitter can bring to unpaid search efforts — to capture more real estate on the search engine results page.
http://searchengineland.com/how-to-boost-search-engine-rankings-using-twitter-38241

The more agile you are, the better your conversion optimization will be. So if you really want to boost your online marketing performance—in a game-changing way—consider adopting agile methodologies in your management. Not surprisingly, a number of marketers have started to adopt agile methodologies—with inspiring results. An agile marketing team can tackle a series of conversion optimization tests in a 2-4 week sprint. They can run daily 15-minute stand-up meetings with all relevant stakeholders upstream and downstream to assure “message match” alignment and eliminate any roadblocks.
http://searchengineland.com/agile-marketing-for-conversion-optimization-37902

“Link magnet” concept is one of the most powerful and important to understand for companies who want a true strategic advantage from their link graph profile. For a long time, SEOs have recommended the creation of “linkbait” content or “high quality content” in order to naturally attract links from the web’s link-able population. Magnetism is link acquisition is the idea that rather than simply producing and hoping people like it enough to link, you build a true incentive for them to do so.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-magnets-a-new-paradigm-in-link-acquisition

Technical problems, errors and surprise releases are all regular features in the day to day management of a website when you’re an SEO. There’s no doubt that maintaining a quick, error free and well optimized site can lead to long term traffic success. Tackling search engine accessibility issues like errors and canonicalization problems is a really important part of your SEO routine.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/health-checks-for-your-seo

Google just announced two new features for some of its most popular APIs: partial response and partial update. This, according to Google, is part of the company’s efforts to make the web faster. Instead of having to pull a full feed of data from Google Calendar, which usually included lots of extra information you don’t really need, developers can now request a partial response that only includes relevant data.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_wants_to_make_apis_faster_introduces_partial_response_update.php