Our easy to understand Keyword Ranking indicators allow you to asses positions and trends within seconds:

Get your in depth SEO Keyword Ranking reports every week – click here and sign up for SEOintelligence now!

New Features:
- Backlinks Tracking
- Google Indexed Page Variance
- Pagerank Variance
- Alexa Rank Variance
- Google Keyword rank updates
- and More!

We’re constantly improving our SEO Tools and Reports – check out the new and improved SEOintelligence SEO Toolset – take our SEO Product Tour.

Sign up for a free 14 day SEO Trial and improve your search engine rankings today!

Our team would like to sincerely thank you for your participation and your invaluable contributions to the program. Our objectives at the outset were to serve the needs of small and midsize self-service customers, as well as evolve the Microsoft strategy to address the Web analytics space.

The insights you’ve contributed through your feedback and your use of the tool have served an invaluable purpose in shaping Microsoft’s future in this space. You’ve helped us work towards making an informed decision about building a general Web analytics solution, and despite the end of life plan, the beta was very much a success.

RIP Microsoft Gatineau!!!adCenter Analytics Beta To Close – adCenter Analytics Blog

In a weighting an average of Google PR (which can’t be completely ignored) and mozRank, we’ve had good luck determining SERPs competitiveness and page strength with this formula:

* Turn off personalized search, to the greatest extent possible. Search is the unfortunate wildcard.
* Search for a target keyword for evaluation of SERPs competitiveness.
* Average the PageRank and mozRank of the top 5 Google organic results, including Universal Search results into an aggregate number. (((Result 1 PR mR) / 2) ((Result 2 (PR*.4) (mR*1.6)) / 2) ((Result 3 (PR*.4) (mR*1.6)) / 2) ((Result 4(PR*.4) (mR*1.6)) / 2) ((Result 5 (PR*.4) (mR*1.6))/ 2))) /5 = SERPs Competitiveness Index for the Keyword
* Compare that 0-10 number with 2 decimal places to the averaged PageRank and mozRank for the Page Strength of the page you’re trying to rank in the SERPs
* If the page strength is above the Competitiveness index, then the page has a decent shot at ranking.
* We use various method to predict the future page strength, by evaluating the history of similar pages in the site hierarchy. We’ll save that for another post.

Attainable SEO: Measuring Page Strength & SERPs Competitiveness With LinkScape » aimClear Search Marketing Blog

And, of course there probably is another more competitive reason (IMHO): Google secretly wants to clone/buy Twitter (think of the impression opportunity for ads!!!!)

You’ve been asking for more control over the appearance of the ads on your sites, so we’re happy to let you know that you can now change the font face of the text in ad units on pages in Latin-character languages. You can choose between Arial, Times, and Verdana font faces. Please note that while font options will appear in every account, they’ll currently only be applied to ad units on pages primarily in Latin-based characters.

There are a few ways to customize the font face of your ad units. If you’d like to quickly change the font settings for every ad unit generated from your account, visit the ‘Ad Display Preference’ section of your Account Settings page to select a new account-wide font face. This will affect all units you’ve created in the past, regardless of whether you used the Manage Ads feature. By default, your ads are currently set to ‘Standard AdSense font family’, which we’ve found has performed well across browsers and displays.

See image from Adsense Management Screen Below (thanks to Ginside):

Again, I think this is a fantastic addition to Adsense – Lets see how this effects the overall CTR on ads.

Visit – Inside AdSense: Fontastic new options for your ad units – for the original story

Would it surprise you if over 40 percent of the queries entered into search boxes at search engines consist of proper nouns, such as the names of specific people or places or things?

Or that combination’s of proper nouns and nouns might make up over 70 percent of most searches?

At least those are a couple of the conclusions from researchers at Yahoo who are trying to find effective ways to better understand the structure of search queries used by searchers.

A study of queries entered into Yahoo’s search engine in August of 2006 took a close look at The Linguistic Structure of English Web-Search Queries (pdf), and tried to get an understanding of the way that people phrase what they are looking for when they search.

The researchers behind the study came up with some interesting information about the queries that people use, and the structure of those queries.

For example, when people perform a second search related to a previous search, one of the most common things that they change in their search terms are numbers. Someone looking for information about the first Spiderman movie might type into a search box the phrase “spiderman 1.” Following up, they may then type in “Spiderman 2.”

The rest of the article dives into the use and structure of peoples query habits and tendencies, it truly will help get you in the mind of the searcher and user easier. As a SEM/SEO expert I sometimes don’t realize – I don’t search like regular people, I use it as a TOOL…most people don’t.
…..Click here to Read more Study on the Structure of Search Queries – SEO by the Sea

Thanks again to Bill @ SEObytheSea.com for such a great post…his site is awesome.

After much thought and work with my designer (thanks Chris) here it is – voila!

Link building is already time-intensive, sometimes frustrating and also confusing – yet completely unavoidable for all SEO’s (Pro and small). Because ultimately, it’s still the trump card for gaining guaranteed higher rankings. That is exactly why the SEO Linking Pyramid is so important – print it out (click image above for full size image) – post it – blog it – tack it up on the wall and remember what your spending your time on is very valuable!

Cheers,
Jeremy

There’s an interesting post today on the Official Google Blog that gives a glimpse inside the company’s usability and eye-tracking studies — tests that help Google determine what their search results pages should look like.

The image above, for example, shows how users interact with a standard results page with 10 links. The deeper colors up top, Google says, show that most people found what they were looking for in the first two results on the page.

No surprise there, but in May, 2007, when Google introduced Universal Search to its interface, marketers began to wonder how the addition of videos, image thumbnails, and other visual cues would affect searcher behavior.

Says Google:

We ran a series of eye-tracking studies where we compared how users scan the search results pages with and without thumbnail images. Our studies showed that the thumbnails did not strongly affect the order of scanning the results and seemed to make it easier for the participants to find the result they wanted.

The thumbnail image seemed to make results with thumbnails easy to notice when the users wanted them … and the thumbnails also seemed to make it easy for people to skip over the results with thumbnails when those results were not relevant to their search.

(There’s an image in Google’s blog post that goes along with that explanation.)

Overall, it’s not the most groundbreaking or in-depth thing you’ll read, but it does provide an interesting peek into how Google tests its search results pages and how we interact with them.

Article by: Matt McGee of Search Engine Land

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, Jane buys what she wants, then blogs about this fantastic thing that’s happened to her. There’s a really nice legitimate link, brought about by simple good service and the desire to tell others about it.

There are many other positive takeaways from keeping an eye on social media: simple brand monitoring to know what people are saying about your company, the chance to right a wrong before it gets worse, the opportunity to personally connect with a past, present, or future client. With services such as Twitter, where people can quickly and easily make a statement without flowery clarifications, things can go downhill quite swiftly and it’s becoming crucial to identify and respond to issues as fast as possible, before someone else steps in with an offering that’s going to cost you a customer for life. What if, instead of ABCWidgets responding to Jane, their main competitor, 123Widgets, saw Jane’s tweet and responded with their own 15% coupon for switching to their company. A lovely opportunity has been lost for a client who practically had it handed to them.

Want to read more of this great article? Then please visit Search Engine Land now!