The online landscape is getting more complex. Speaking from a marketer's perspective, there are more points of influence that can alter a buyer's path. At the last Search Insider Summit, John Yi from Facebook introduced us to something he called Pinball Marketing. It's an apt analogy for the new online reality.

This week I'm attending the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition in San Diego, and Tuesday featured a day of search engine marketing workshops. Here are some highlights from the various speakers and their advice on best practices

If you're in search marketing, you probably hang on Google's every word. It's time to start hanging on every letter! Here's what every search geek needs to know about Google today, from A to Z...

A picture is worth a thousand words. Which is great when you've got lots of space to fill and don't have the resources to fill it with a thousand actual words. But what sort of photos work best in the context of a marketing strategy? Also, how can photos help with SEO? And how and where should you use them?

I am in Paris for some meetings coming off of Havas' all managers meeting (AMM) in Barcelona, where we met with Zaryn Dentzel, the founder of Tuenti. Tuenti is Spain's leading social networking community (a la Facebook), which just got sold for a hefty chunk of change. Dentzel told the group that he thinks messengers, like BlackBerry's BBM, will be the next major arms race in the colliding worlds of mobile and social media.

There's little argument that mobile's time has come. According to Google, mobile searches make up anywhere from 5% to 12% of the total query volume for many popular keywords. And for many categories (like searches for local businesses) the percentage is much higher. That officially qualifies as "something to consider" in most marketing strategies. For many marketers, though, the addition of mobile is a simple check box addition in planning a search campaign. In Google's quest to make life simple for marketers, we're missing some fundamental aspects of marketing to mobile prospects. Okay, we're missing one fundamental aspect: it's different. …

At SMX, search marketers from across the globe convene for two days to discuss the state of the industry, predict future trends, and network, with announcements that should dictate how the search elite will spend their summers. I'm in the thick of this year's show as I write this. Day 1 wrapped yesterday and already there are several clear themes emerging that should keep search marketers busy for a long time to come.

About a month ago, I wrote a post on Google's rich snippets, a way for website owners to share extra information such as ratings and review information directly in the Google organic search result listing. Then last week came a big announcement: Google, Bing and Yahoo have teamed up to develop a standardized microdata format that the three engines will use to better understand the content contained on Web pages.

Publishers from Huffington Post and Drudge Report to The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are all very good at the tease. Moreover, as they've gotten savvier about SEO over the last 10 years, they've gotten increasingly good at leveraging rising and falling memes, as well as keywords, in their arsenal of teases. So, for this latest post in my content marketing series, I dissect the tease.

My connected life is starting to drop into distinct buckets. Now that I have my choice of connecting through my smartphone (an iPhone), my tablet (an iPad), my work computer (a MacBook) and my home computer (a Windows box), not to mention the new Smart TVs we bought (Samsungs), I'm starting to see my digital footprints (or my digital slime trail, to use Esther Dyson's term) diverge. And the nature of the divergence is interesting.