By now, you must have seen at least one of IAC/InterActiveCorp's commercials for Ask.com, asking "Can your search engine do this?" and then proceeding to show off the virtues of Ask 3D in all its video-playing, image-thumbnailing, related-searching glory. It would be interesting to see how much IAC has spent on this Ask ad campaign, but according to Compete's October search data, the company is already getting a solid ROI in traffic. Search queries increased 14% from September and while Ask's overall market share of 3.9% is still down from last year's 4.3%, this is the second straight …

Well, it's not an acquisition (yet), but Google and domain-hosting service Go Daddy have inked a new deal that will automatically give Go Daddy customers access to Google's suite of Webmaster tools. Go Daddy will also ensure that its customers' sitemaps get submitted to Google without any extra effort on their part. While most search pros already use Google's Webmaster Tools, Analytics, and often third-party site monitoring services, smaller business owners that launch Web sites with Go Daddy will now have access to the traffic, linking and robot.txt file info that can help boost their search traffic (and …

Adding images to blog postings or other site content is par for the course when it comes to drawing in the user's eye, and is a must for snagging additional search traffic since the engines have all implemented blended search. But finding royalty-free or public domain images to use can be a challenge, so Loren Baker lists 10 resources where the pictures are plentiful and the costs are (virtually) nonexistent. From Flickr.com to FreeMediaGoo.com to SXC.hu, there are thumbnails, audio and video files, as well as various ways to search for and categorize a wealth of image content. …

With the explosion of social networking "platforms" in the past few weeks, and the increased convergence of search, social media and overall Web site optimization, figuring out which platform works best for which audience, advertiser and ultimately for your search marketing efforts will be an ongoing task. Marshall Kirkpatrick serves up an at-a-glance view of the top five social networking platforms, including Google's new Android and the content storage model of Box.net, and also provides a brief description of each one and how they benefit developers. His quick chart could also serve as the basis for future platform …

Microsoft's Live Search now has a section called "Most Popular Products" that aggregates and summarizes user reviews of computer and electronics products within the search results. Thumbnails of the products appear within the SERPs with a star rating, and when users click on the picture, they're taken to the product's review pages. MSN compiles these reviews from a number of third-party Web sites and in addition to the actual written statements, gives users a graphical depiction of how the product was rated for specific features, called "User reviews at a glance." A search for "Vaio laptop" for …

Webmasters can use Live Search to get an instant read on all of their inbound links again, as forum users are reporting that MSN has reinstated a version of the "link command." Adding the "+linkdomain:" or "+link:" parameters to a URL search string will return a list of all the sites that are linking to it, and can even go down to a page-by-page basis. For example, entering "+link:www.mediapost.com" into the Live Search box will turn up some five pages worth of sites that directly link to MediaPost. MSN took this feature offline in March because …

Call them "Black Hat," or dishonest, or just plain lazy -- but whatever you do, Jeffrey Smith urges you not to get caught up using these 10 tactics as part of a site's SEO strategy. While the usual suspects of stuffing keywords in the title and submitting your site to too many random directories make the cut, Smith also warns against the practice of hiding a .CSS table (just one pixel big) somewhere on the site and packing it with as many keywords as possible. This tactic has been popular in the U.K., but there are reports of …

The MarketingExperiments team serves up an in-depth set of case studies (complete with an audio walkthrough) that shows how tweaking a landing page for message continuity and congruence can greatly improve conversions. Continuity refers to making sure that each step in the conversion process, whether it's asking for information, getting users to click another link, or sign up for a newsletter, either states or supports the PPC ad message (or value proposition). Congruence is the idea that every element of the landing page, from the text, to the images, to the logo and overall design, also …

With the explosion of local review sites and the wealth of searchable content they create, many businesses have taken to including a review strategy in their overall search plan. But which sites are best for a specific market? Does Yelp or CitySearch or some other IYP have the most traction in their niche? The Local Search Hound outlines the steps toward building a review strategy, starting with conducting simple searches (that include the word "review" and either the business type or the city name) and seeing which review aggregators come up. The top three or so will be …

By collecting material from various forum posts made by Google's Matt Cutts, the SEO Blog team came up with this winning formula for SEO: "Good Content + Good Links = Good SERPs." Quality is key when it comes to content, but so is keeping the amount of data on each page down to a reasonable 5-10kB. This keeps the load times manageable for both broadband and dial-up users. For keywords, Cutts' posts recommended a strategy of "Once in the title, once in the description tag, once in the heading, once in the URL, once in bold, …