Analytics & conversion

6 Usability Tips to Maximize B2B Website Conversion

B2B marketers invest a substantial amount of time, effort, and money driving visitors to websites. Making sure the site adheres to basic usability principles is critical to maximizing online marketing results and alleviating obstacles that prevent prospects from taking the desired actions. Below are six, easy to implement usability tips to ensure that visitors get […]

Google

Google Updates Toolbar PageRank For New Years

Some webmasters are celebrating, others not so much, as Google closes out 2008 with another toolbar PageRank update — the first one since September. Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed the update via Twitter late last night. There’s lots of Twitter talk today about the update, along with discussion on Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Journal. […]

Link building

Link Week Loose Ends

My Link Week columns rotate every other week, and over the course of the last few columns several questions and comments have been sent my way.  For this week’s column, I’m responding to a selection of those questions and comments.

Google

Rumor: Marissa Mayer, Google’s 19th Employee, To Leave

Gawker reports that Google’s 19th employee, Marissa Mayer, is planning on ending her career with Google in 2009. Marissa Mayer is one of the most public figures that Google has ever had. Gawker reports receiving word that someone overheard discussion from “Top Googlers” that Mayer will be leaving in 2009. Clearly, Mayer doesn’t need the […]

Content

Google’s Product Search Gaining & A Look At Google’s Top Services

Google’s Product Search Catching Up Fast With Shopping Rivals from Investor Business Daily reports on a comScore release that Google’s Product Search is gaining in the category of shopping search. In fact, Google Product Search is up 786% from the year-ago November. TechCrunch ranks the top ten Google products and services by the two data […]

Bing

Microsoft Updates Virtual Earth Data & Images

The Virtual Earth Blog announced that they have updated the data and images for some locations. The update includes data refreshes to Greece, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Former Yugoslav Republic Of Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and Mexico. In addition Microsoft did global vector […]

Apple

Tough Love For Microsoft Search

Back in June, I spoke at Microsoft as part of a regular series for those involved with its webmaster tools group and anyone generally interested in search. My talk was called “Tough Love For Microsoft Search,” and I covered various reasons why I felt the company has generally failed to make headway in the space. […]

Link building

How Monitoring Twitter Can Help Build Links

Here’s a scenario: Jane gets on Twitter and tweets about wanting a coupon for a company that I’ll call ABCWidgets, because yes, I am that dorky. The staff of ABCWidgets, being all forward-thinking, are monitoring Twitter to see what’s being said about them. They see this tweet, respond to Jane with a 10% off coupon, […]

SEO

5 (More) Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should

How would you like to track hot news geographically? Or see where social conversations are happening on a map? Maybe you’d like to find businesses that are open 24 hours a day, or research keywords on a state-by-state basis. If so, read on for a look at five search tools you may not know about, […]

Google

Blogger Image Thumbnails In Google A Bug?

Steve Rubel reported seeing an excess of what he calls “Blog Thumbnails” in the Google search results. In short, when you do certain searches, Google may show little thumbnail alongside the first set of results. For Steve, this has been happening for “blogger’s name and some other related keywords.” Personally, I have been seeing these […]

Apple

Local Searches Set to Flip to Mobile Phone

Given the continuing growth in the smartphone market, mobile phones are poised to become the first source people turn to when searching for local business information. Until widespread adoption of smartphones occurs, though, there will be a gap that smart businesses will seek to fill. There were some especially telling findings in comScore’s presentation, “New […]

Google

Google To Monetize Friend Connect?

Michael Arrington said he has confirmed reports that Google employees call Google Friend Connect, “Friendsense.” Friend Connect is Google’s social widget that site owners can add to their site to help bridge other Google account users together. Google launched it early this year and then made it widely available to anyone to add to their […]

Ecommerce

Christmas Logos From Google & Others For 2008

Happy Holidays from Search Engine Land! Below is a listing of special logos from Google and the search industry for the holidays. I also posted this at the Search Engine Roundtable, with links to the past five years of logos from our industry. Everyone, have a happy holidays and thank you all for reading!

SEO

Find Friends On Twitter With Twitter People Search

Twitter announced that you can now use their people search feature to find friends, family or colleagues that are using Twitter. For example, I wanted to see if any of my immediate family is on Twitter, so I searched for schwartz. It looks like I am the most popular Schwartz on Twitter (ahem). But it […]

Ecommerce

Hakia Debuts “Digital Newspaper” Start Page

If you’re a general search engine that competes with Google (Yahoo & Microsoft), as you know, it’s very hard to make headway in that game. But if you recharacterize or reposition yourself as other than a “search engine” you might gain some adoption. To some degree that’s what Kosmix did by building out multi-media rich […]

LinkedIn

Search Engine Land’s New Look

Search Engine Land turned two years old this month. In that time, our content has blossomed. We run nearly 20 columns on search marketing issues, routinely post multiple brief items per day about breaking search news along with regular long, in-depth analysis or “How To” stories. Our old design didn’t serve to present this content […]

Google Analytics

Wishing For The Perfect Search Marketing Tool

In The Trenches is a spotlight of tips, tricks, and news about the tools search engine marketing professionals use to give them a leg up on the competition. My SEM Wish List: All I Want For Christmas is the Perfect Search Tool, Continued In my last column, I explained how much I want a new […]

SEO

Japanese Lawyers, Professors Try To Block StreetView

Google StreetView has been a controversial offering since its launch, with privacy at the core of both individual and regulatory concerns. It’s also enormously practical and useful in many cases. But governments from Canada to Europe have sought to gain privacy concessions from Google in its international rollout. Google has also been sued a couple […]

Apple

A Plea To Stop Dissing Your Customers

Dear Search Marketers: I’m worried about us. The way we’ve started talking about our target audience has me concerned that our priorities may be out of whack. By target audience I don’t mean our clients or employers. I mean the people to whom we’re marketing—the human beings performing the searches and on whose backs we […]

Ecommerce

Does Sound Encourage Searchers To Use SearchWiki?

Michael Arrington went on a rant about Google testing sound effect in the new Google SearchWiki. In short, Michael is upset that Google would spend the time adding sound effects over adding an option to turn off SearchWiki. I do agree with with Michael on this, but we do know that feature is coming in […]

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