Often small, local businesses face the question of how to grow visits to their websites, and ultimately, to their businesses. SEO and PPC are the traditional, proven ways that can boost site traffic and leads to all sites; but, for small and local businesses it makes great sense to start with local search optimization. Local [...]

Chitika, an ad network, recently published interesting results from a study of 41,103,403 impressions of search traffic coming into its network between June 13 and June 19.
Chitika found that 26 percent of organic search traffic was the result of three-word searches. Two-word searches followed with 19 percent of organic search traffic. Four word searches followed [...]

After months (has it already been a year?) of hand-wringing and speculation in the search industry, Google finally announced Caffeine is live. It’s an appropriate name for the update, since it seems like Google’s been injected with a jolt of the good stuff to produce faster, fresher results.

Here’s a nice, concise breakdown of what [...]

Alhough Google has defined and become synonymous with search – most people say they are “googling” something when they use any kind of search engine – bing is proving to be a serious contender in the fight to be the search engine of the people.  bing is slowly insinuating its way into our lives through [...]

Last week Google decided to change the name of Google Local Business Center to Google Places. Google made this decision based on the idea that Google Place Pages will better connect with the place where local business information is claimed, entered and enhanced.

Along with the name change, come a few more changes. Specifically, Google Places [...]

Last week Google launched AdWords’ Remarketing, which is basically a new way for a company to stalk a potential customer with an ad until she caves and buys.

It works like this: A potential customer followed an ad from a paid Google search listing, but while on the page of that site, she decides not to [...]

Last week, Facebook ended a year of remarkable growth by overtaking Google’s popularity among US internet users. Last week’s industry data shows Facebook scored more visits on its home page than the search engine’s homepage.

Research firm Hitwise said that the two sites accounted for 14% of all US internet visits last week. Facebook’s home page [...]

Yesterday in Paris, a court tribunal ordered EBay to pay Louis Vuitton over $310,000 in legal costs and damages for using search terms that “misled consumers,” by driving consumers to the EBay website. The court also supported Louis Vuitton’s claim that EBay’s actions damaged the Louis Vuitton brand.

What I find most interesting about this case [...]

Making your website friendly to search engines is absolutely critical to improving your website’s online visibility. By increasing your natural rankings in search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Bing you will increase the visibility of your website, while simultaneously increasing the quality of your web traffic. Natural rankings are the results search engines generate [...]