JQuery is a very flexible tool for managing form data. There is a plugin that allows JQuery to manage form data passing this data using AJAX.

This Javascript plugin can be downloaded free from: http://malsup.com/jquery/form/

I highly recommend reading the great posts over at http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.post/

Telling JQuery about your Form

In order for JQuery to process your form you need to tell it a few things first.

•    What Form to work on
•    How to validate the form
•    Where to post the form data to
•    What to do next (On success)

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Last week, SMX London graduated to SMX Advanced status. We in the UK eagerly anticipated the fresh new tips and tricks which are usually left until several beers later in the networking bars!

And we certainly weren’t disappointed. I thought it would be useful to share with Search Engine Land readers the top ten advanced search marketing tips which I gleaned from the show.

Link building: Offer a student discount. Among Kelvin Newman’s excellent 17 ways to build university and government links, the one I found most thought-provoking was for e-commerce sites to offer a student discount. This means that the generous offer instantly encourages university sites to link and may also generate further student blog and online coverage too.

Search Discounted Car Insurance Quotes From Local Insurance Companies

If you ever felt that your are being charged too much for your car insurance quotes,  you’re not alone. Too many of us are overquoted on our car insurance quotes for one simple reason: getting multiple local car insurance quotes the traditional way is not easy. But with online car insurance quotes from EveryInsuranceQuotes.com, there are no more excuses for paying too much for auto insurance.

A couple of weeks ago I had the deal with Mike Clough, who manages The Blog Zone group at LinkedIn. As the result of the deal, I became manager of his subgroup Guest Blogger and announced this subgroup as MyBlogGuest official home at LinkedIn.

I am pretty much new to managing an active LinkedIn group like this, so I decided to do some research. In this post I am sharing my findings (that seem to be working for me!):

1. Start a Discussion

If that’s a new group, you will need to create a couple of relevant threads to encourage discussion (in my case, that was about joining the existent ones).

If you are an active blogger, you must be reading and processing plenty of information daily.

You save some of this information by copying-pasting to whichever notes you are managing or by bookmarking the page or saving the link. You go by most of the information to forget about it forever.

With such flood of the information you should have plenty of hacks on how to process it quickly and efficiently. Today I am adding one more to your arsenal: a tool for fun web annotating.

Fluent in search marketing? SMX Advanced Seattle is for you. This year’s agenda packed with expert-level tips to drive traffic and increase conversions using SEO, paid search, social media marketing and vertical search tactics. Programed by the editors of Search Engine Land, session topics include:

- SEO for Google Vs. Bing: How Different Are They?
- How’s Your QSO? Quality Score Optimization For Pros
- Twitter, Real Time Search & Real Time SEO
- Pump Up Those Conversions
- Search Marketing In The Facebook Zone
- The Mad Scientists of Paid Search
- Location Services: The New Local Search?

The savvy search marketer always explores tail terms to improve overall performance. If done right, tail terms can convert better than the head and can also be cheaper in terms of Cost Per Click (CPC). Hence, effective tail management lifts the performance of the overall campaign.

When exploring the tail, marketers are always faced with the dilemma of risk and reward. Bidding on underexposed keywords aggressively might bring in a lot of conversions and uncover gems in your campaign. However, you could also end up spending a lot without any conversions. The question then is how to identify potential candidates while mitigating risk.

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.

On Google.com, Google used a boldface for search suggestions, moved the “Google Search” and “I’m Feeling Lucky” buttons in the box and removed the the result counts a while back. Now, this interface and behavior is the default behavior for all Google international properties. That means it is available on 50 languages across all Google’s 170 domains.

It’s probably no surprise to anyone working as a search marketer, but the industry is chugging along at double-digit growth rates, even as budgets for other forms of marketing and advertising continue to be slashed. According to SEMPO’s sixth annual State of Search Engine Marketing Report, the North American search engine marketing industry will grow 14% this year from $14.6 billion in 2009 to $16.6 billion by the end of 2010.

The report, based on a global online survey of nearly 1,500 client-side marketers and agency respondents, also found that measuring the return on investment (ROI) is the biggest challenge facing marketers this year in all three key search tactics covered in the survey—search engine optimization, paid search and social media marketing.

I had a good chuckle over the news yesterday that Facebook apparently has caused an increase in syphilis (or not). So reported the Daily Telegraph, which turns around today to add that to a list of other things Facebook supposedly causes, such as cancer or a surge in rickets. Anything missing? How about asking Google, Yahoo and Bing.

NOTE: A special welcome to our visitors from Facebook! For more stories from us on search, delivered via Facebook, become a fan of our Search Engine Land page!

Last March Google initiated a trial of what it calls “remarketing” for display and text ads throughout its content network. Today it’s opening up the option for all AdWords advertisers. To be clear this is not “search retargeting” and doesn’t involve any Google.com query data.

The benefit of this is being able to reach consumers, throughout the Google content network (including on YouTube), who came to an advertiser’s website but didn’t transact. Pages can be tagged and cookies are used to identify that visitor or a category of people, who then later see an ad or offer directed specifically at their interests. The Google AdWords blog explains how it works:

Twitter has just announced that to protect people from scams, links in direct messages and sent via email will be shortened using its own URL shortener. It’s a welcome move. Still, I was curious about any impacts this might have for good marketers who are not trying to scam people. Good news, on that front.

To test things, I sent myself two direct messages from the @smx account that I oversee to my personal account at @dannysullivan. The messages had these links in them:

http://searchengineland.com/math-engines-for-multiplying-mixed-fractions-its-wolfram-alpha-over-google-bing-37653

http://selnd.com/du5hRX

The financial analysts were busy yesterday pushing out the comScore search market share data for February, which officially comes out later today. What the data show is: Google regaining some share “lost” in January and continued gains by Bing, albeit at a somewhat slowing pace.

Yahoo lost some share again and so did Ask, while AOL was “stable.” Yahoo’s search losses, attributed by the search team there to lost “default” toolbar and other similar deals, is now a kind of chronic, month over month phenomenon — a decline in slow motion. I might also argue it reflects a weakening of Yahoo’s brand in connection with search over time.

In Search Month European Edition we bring you a monthly update of European search news, with related links to full coverage. Here’s what happened in February.

Googlers convicted in Italy. The biggest news in Europe in February without a doubt was the conviction of three Googlers in Italy. They were convicted to a suspended sentence after the company had allegedly failed to respond quickly to an uploaded YouTube video over a year ago which showed Italian youngsters harassing a young boy with Downs Syndrome.

Taking a page from Salesforce.com, last night Google formally launched the anticipated Google Apps Marketplace at its “Campfire One” developer event. In short it allows companies and developers to gain access and sell into Google’s “2 million businesses and 25 million Google Apps users.” The marketplace launches with 50 partners including Intuit and competitor Zoho.

Google controls billing for paid apps and gets a 20 percent cut of the revenue. All of the apps will potentially integrate with existing Google tools and services. According to the Google Blog:

Because we are still in the research phase of PPC development, it’s important to get a very clear understanding of the advertiser’s business online and how that will affect the way we build and manage the account. Last week, I introduced the concept of the keyword landscape, the set of keywords, ads and competitors that are relevant to your advertiser. This week, I’ll dive even deeper into the keyword landscape using advanced tools that can tell us a lot more than what last week’s quick glance revealed.

In my discussion yesterday of the comScore search data I neglected to point out (as GigaOm has) that Facebook saw 10 percent search query growth in the past month. That’s significant and it validates an argument I’ve long made that Facebook could turn out to be a meaningful player in search, which would in turn benefit Bing.

Here are the comScore “expanded” search data:

Meanwhile over on the other side of the globe Motorola has made a very public statement that whatever happens with Google in China, it will be working with Bing search on its Android handsets there.

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Yahoo announced a search update to their index. The update includes possible updates to Yahoo’s crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms.

Dan Rampton, Yahoo’s Product Manager said:

The Yahoo! Search engineering teams are rolling out updates to crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms. Similar to previous updates, you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process, which we expect to complete over the next few days.

I have not seen much discussion around fluctuations in Yahoo’s search index recently, but maybe some significant changes are coming soon?

Credits to: Barry Schwartz

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