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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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.

Online reputation: Turn a negative into a positive. Mikkel deMib Svendsen talked about how if The New York Times has a negative article ranking in Google’s top 10 for your brand name, this can be very difficult to outrank. Instead of attempting to force this down with new listings, try looking for positive content on the same domain and building some links into this. The objective is to convince Google that the positive version is more valuable/relevant, so that this replaces the negative result with the positive article instead.

Keyword research: Use Mozenda to find new opportunities. A superb presentation from Distilled’s Sam Crocker saw a host of new keyword research ideas and tools being discussed. Most notably, Sam suggested using Mozenda to scrape Google suggest results and download this into a spreadsheet of keywords. This tip was clearly a winner with the audience!

Paid search: Use capitalization to erase poor quality score history Richard Fergie spotted that if you have a keyword with a poor PPC quality score, and still want to persevere with it, try creating the same keyword using different capitalization. Google currently allows you to insert multiple keywords in the AdWords interface for the same keyword (when using different cases), despite this not being case-sensitive when the query is made. So this could be a quick way of getting back on track, without that poor quality score keyword bringing down the whole account.

Google: Twitter links influence QDF and likely to impact organic search. Rand Fishkin shared experiences of seeing noticeable increases in “query deserves freshness” rankings, spotted following a link being retweeted several times on Twitter. He also spoke about Google and Microsoft’s data deals, which means that they have link information available from Twitter and Facebook and are likely to apply this to their algorithms for organic search in the future.

Read the full article >>>

Twitter announced two new ways to find new friends on Twitter. Twitter added to the find friends section, a LinkedIn and Facebook tab to allow you to connect with your LinkedIn connections via Twitter and friends on Facebook.

The only issue is that as soon as Twitter announced this feature, the Facebook connection tool was disabled. Twitter said “the Facebook app cannot currently access your Facebook friend list. We believe this is an issue on Facebook’s end.” There is currently no update on the status of adding and discovering friends on Twitter via Facebook. But LinkedIn does work and you can access that over here to find new friends.

Here are screen shots of both Facebook and LinkedIn via Twitter:

May was a banner month for YouTube. ComScore’s latest video rankings report shows that the site hit all-time highs with 14.6 billion videos viewed and more than 100 videos seen per user. Needless to say, YouTube remains the dominant player in video rankings, with 43% of online videos being seen on the site, according to comScore.

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.

Discount Insurance rates has always been available to safe drivers who have time to compare local car insurance companies. But most of us don’t want to spend hours on the phone calling around to multiple low car insurance companies, submitting our information over and over and waiting for a car insurance quote. That’s why we’ve created this website. With just a few clicks, you can get online quotes and find low car insurance rates from local car insurance agencies, agents and companies in just minutes.

Through our relationship with nationally recognized  local car insurance companies, such as Nationwide, Geico, Allstate, Progressive and more, we can guarantee that you’ll get a low cost on online car insurance and insurance discounts.  Drawing upon our experience and knowledge, we can also help you search insurance for any type of situation, including:

• Teen discounts on insurance
• Student discounts
• Motorcycle insurance
• Low mileage insurance
• Monthly Discounts for good drivers
• Insurance for women drivers
• Cheap Car insurance Quote
• High risk – Sr22 Quotes

Whether your driving record is squeaky clean or has a few violations, you can get low car insurance by searching for local car insurance quotes. Whether you live on the West Coast, the East Coast or anywhere in between, we can find you the best deal on online car insurance. We cover every city in the U.S. from Avery, Texas to New Jersey, Pennsylvania – if you can type in your zip code, we can lower your car insurance and you can keep more money in your pocket.

Credits to: Car Insurance Quotes

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).

The best way to spur discussion is to let (new) members promote themselves: invite them to share their blogs or follow each other on Twitter – this usually is very encouraging for new members to start participating.

2. Invite Your Contacts

LinkedIn is much less cluttered than Facebook, which is obviously a good thing. But this also creates some inconveniences one of them being that you are only allowed to invite 50 of your friends a day to your LinkedIn group.

Well, on the other hand, you can thus make it with more thought coming back daily (or weekly) to invite new friends and look through those who have recently joint.

You can “Share” the group right from the home page or (if you are a manager of the group) you can go to “Manage” and “Send invitations” to your friends from there:

3. Encourage Active Users

When a user becomes prominent as a poster, encourage him and help him (These are the catalyst to a thriving group):

• Answer his questions and share your advice;
• Try a personal touch: send a direct message asking about his feedback on the group, etc.

Rewarding positive behavior is as important as banning negative uses.

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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.

Yooper is a nice FireFox addon that lets you easily highlight text on the page and the easily save it online. The best features of the tool are those that allow to quickly copy all page highlights and also to easily search through all your previously made highlights.

Lets see it in action.

Install the addon here, re-start your browser and notice a new toolbar in your FireFox status bar:

The first thing you want to do is to login to Yooper using your open ID (I was using Google). Once you are logged in, you will notice that the very first icon in the Yooper toolbar becomes green.

Now, just go test it. Open any page and highlight key sentences and phrases as you read. You will see that parts of the text you highlight becomes yellow (you can change the default color if you want to):

Once done, click the green icon in the toolbar and choose “View the summary”:

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- 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 SMX Advanced Seattle program is fast-paced with plenty of Q&A. Keynotes are no exception. Google software engineer Matt Cutts returns for a PowerPoint-free, no-holds-barred “You&A” conversation with the SMX audience.

Nearly 60% of the tickets for SMX Advanced Seattle have already been sold. Pre-registration is required to ensure your place. This intentionally intimate conference has sold out each year since its launch in 2007.

Join us June 8-9 at the Bell Harbor International Convention Center in Seattle. Register today and save with our early bird rates! Group registration packages are also available.

For more info and to register, visit: http://smxpo.com/c3zggU

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 most effective way of managing the tail is to use an algorithmic approach where you can use a finite mixture and confidence models. This is a technology-based approach that scales very well and has done very well for the clients I manage. However, if you are a small advertiser without access to sophisticated technology you are probably looking for a simpler heuristic method.

Consider a campaign of 10k+ keywords as shown above. Among these, you have enough data to determine if the keywords are good or bad for 1,470 of them. These are high confidence keywords where we know exactly what to expect. However, the majority of these, 8,908 to be exact, are lower confidence keywords where we do not have enough data. Of those, 3,000 plus keywords have seen page one and, hence, have been given a chance. However, 5,797 keywords have not seen page one and, therefore, are potential gems. Marketers should focus on these keywords.

However, here comes the risk part. If many of these keywords are already bid over the average campaign CPC (here $1.07), then bidding them higher would increase your risk. You should focus on the low bid keywords as they have not been exposed and have a lower risk potential. These keywords (marked in red) are your best learning opportunity. In these keywords, several of them have not even seen an impression. So, in a sense, these keywords should preferentially be bid up and monitored. Once the low bid, low position keywords have been exposed, you can move to the next tail opportunities such as low bid-higher position and high bid-low position keywords.

Read the full article >>>

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.

Last week or the week before, Google began rolling out support for real-time search in more languages. This wasn’t really noticed by us, English speaking searchers, but it is something Google has been working hard on. Now, real-time search will be available for hot topics and trending topics on 40 languages.

Read the full article >>>

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.

Another unsurprising finding: Google dominates. 97% of companies responding to the survey said they advertise on Google, with 71% paying to advertise on the Google search network, and 56% distributing ads via the Google content network. By contrast, 50% use Yahoo! Search, and 44% use Bing, compared to 54% who said they used Microsoft Live (MSN) search in 2009.

Many search marketers have experienced keyword inflation on Google. 56% of advertisers and 62% of agencies said that Google keywords have become more expensive over the last year, but these increases appear to be mostly limited to Google, with only 32% reporting higher costs on Yahoo and 29% on Bing.

Another key trend relates to the impact of personalized search results, with 31% reporting that personalization is having a “highly significant” impact on search marketing efforts, with a further 44% calling it a “significant” trend.

Let’s get social

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.

Read the full article >>>

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!

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. So wondering what many people think that Facebook causes? Just type that in and see what suggestions come up!

On Google, it’s like this:

Going down that list, we learn

• Facebook causes divorce
• Facebook causes application [this confused me at first. It's probably the Facebook Causes application, says Marshall Kirkpatrick ]
• Facebook causes depression
• Facebook causes donations [hey, something positive!]
• Facebook causes internet explorer to crash [clearly unfair to investor and partner Microsoft]
• Facebook causes app [probably to crash]
• Facebook causes jealousy
• Facebook causes problems [see, Facebook is the universal cause of all problems]
• Facebook causes statistics [probably stats on things that Facebook causes]
• Facebook causes cancer [it was in the Daily Mail; it must be true]

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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:

Let’s say you’re a basketball team with tickets that you want to sell. You can put a piece of code on the tickets page of your website, which will let you later show relevant ticket ads (such as last minute discounts) to everyone who has visited that page, as they subsequently browse sites in the Google Content Network. In addition to your own site, you can also remarket to users who visited your YouTube brand channel or clicked your YouTube homepage ad.

You can also run a number of remarketing campaigns at the same time. For example, you could offer discount game tickets to users who’ve previously visited your tickets page, advertise VIP hospitality packages to users who clicked on your “How to get to the arena” page, and advertise a sale on team merchandise to users who previously visited your YouTube brand channel.

You might be inclined to call this “behavioral targeting” and so did I on the phone with Google yesterday. However, Google doesn’t like that term and finds it imprecise. In addition there’s a stigma associated with it among privacy groups and to some degree the FTC (and maybe some regulation coming in the near future). Thus Google uses the more positive term “Interest Based Advertising.”

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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

When these links arrived as direct messages, as viewed through the Twitter site, they were unchanged. Nothing had been altered. My understanding is that links WILL change in direct messages in the near future, however.

When Twitter emailed me these messages, the links within them had been shortened as follows:

http://twt.tl/q0TtFzY

http://twt.tl/ch4FcsH

From a marketing perspective, I wondered whether Twitter was stripping out my own URL shortening entirely. If so, I potentially lost important tracking information as well as link credit.

Read the full article >>>

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.

The combined “search alliance” share (MicroHoo) is “flat” at 28.3 percent, according to the comScore figures. Here are the February share data as presented:

• Google: 65.5 percent
• Yahoo: 16.8 percent
• Bing: 11.5 percent
• AOL: 2.5 percent
• Ask: 3.7 percent

For comparison here are the January comScore share data:

Credits to: Greg Sterling

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.

Yandex sees income growth. Russian search giant Yandex reported that 2009 was a good year, with earnings up 14% on total revenue of 8.7 billion rubles (about 205 million euros). The number of advertisers grew 55%.

Bing reduces search data storage in Europe. Microsoft agreed to cooperate with the European Commission by reducing the amount time it retains Bing search data to six months. The European Commission had put a lot of pressure on the software giant to adjust the privacy policy to comply with EU regulations. Up to now Microsoft had been holding data for 18 months.

EU approves Microsoft/Yahoo search alliance. The EU, as well as the US, has given clearance to Microsoft and Yahoo to go on with their search alliance. The EU sees no restrictions, which means they can go ahead and implement the partnership immediately.

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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:

Once installed to a company’s domain, these third-party applications work like native Google applications. With administrator approval, they may interact with calendar, email, document and/or contact data to increase productivity. Administrators can manage the applications from the familiar Google Apps control panel, and employees can open them from within Google Apps. With OpenID integration, Google Apps users can access the other applications without signing in separately to each . . .

Google’s partner slide at launch:

Google has enjoyed some momentum in the enterprise with Apps but adoption has been tiny relative to Microsoft’s installed base of software users. This however would appear to be a “game changer,” to use the overly used phrase, by bringing all sorts of creativity and new functionality into Google Apps. It also instantly creates a broader ecosystem around the offering that will drive interest and adoption.

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Having a solid keyword monitoring tool in your SEM toolbox is absolutely crucial for proper PPC management. Remember, paid search operates in a constantly evolving environment. For the most part, it’s auction based, so knowing who else is bidding on your terms, how often, with what messages and how their ad/landing pages combinations work together can be some of the most important intelligence you gather for the successful management of your account. Some keyword landscapes involve literally millions of keywords and dozens of competitors. Without a good piece of software working for you to track all of these variables, you could be missing valuable optimization opportunities.

Some of these tools include (and there are others—please list your favorites in the comments below):

• AdGooroo
• The Search Monitor
• Keyword Competitor

(As a side note, even though we’re talking about paid search, these tools generally track organic terms as well.)

Although these tools differ in terms of interface, feature list, methodology, etc, here’s an example of some of the important research you can get from a keyword monitoring solution:

More accurate average position rankings on your terms. For those of you who are thinking: “Why do I need to shell out good money on a tool when I can just go to Google myself and see where I rank?” I’m sorry to disappoint you, but the search engine results pages (SERPs) you see when you search may be (and most likely are) dramatically different than what someone else in another location at another time sees. Google is smart. They know relevance is the key to great search results and are tailoring each SERP on the fly for every query. A searcher’s geolocation, time of day/day of week, previous search habits, previous click habits, context of your most recent searches, etc. may influence where your paid search listings may show.

Keyword monitoring tools track engines at multiple locations across all times of the day so your average position is calculated in aggregate. This blended metric is much more accurate than your own searches from the same browser in one location.

Here’s a screenshot from Keyword Competitor that shows how what a gift basket advertiser would see when tracking average positions from their keyword list:

Read the full article >>>

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.

Read the full article >>>

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