Lisa Barone's blow-by-blow of the Local Search Optimization panel at PubCon includes anecdotes, her commentary on the quality of each presentation, and insight from search pros like Local.com's Jennifer Black and search-savvy small business marketers like Purposeinc's David Klein. Black's tips focused on maintaining a site's listing in the big search (and smaller local search) engines. Keeping the contact info correct and complete -- including hours of operation, payment methods and photos or logos is a vital step in ensuring that searchers find the right information naturally. Meanwhile, Klein said that asking customers directly about …

An Anaheim, Calif. florist reports that recent changes to the rating and review info in her Google Local listings and ads have had a negative impact on traffic and CTRs. Over the past week, she noticed that CitySearch reviews were all but stripped from her local listing, and that the number of reviews it took to get star ratings included in the OneBox had jumped from three to five. "The review stars and ratings had a HUGE positive impact on click-throughs and purchases," she wrote. "Traffic from the OneBox is down since the change." She also …

SEM Gorilla's Randy Zlobec reviews three tools for monitoring page rank across multiple engines, starting with the free Keyword Tracker & Ranking Tool from DigitalPoint.com. The tool allows Webmasters to check their rankings for specific keywords on multiple engines over time. For $167, you can access the SEO Elite tool, which offers rich competitive analysis data. The tool (created by Brad Callen) reveals which companies have purchased specific ads, their relative rankings, and what some of the most expensive PPC ads are for the chosen keywords. Lastly, Web CEO offers much of the same options as …

Florida is now the sixth state to partner with Google for its official Web properties. As part of the deal, Google will index info from multiple state databases (like the Florida Department of Environmental Protection) and make it more easily available via Web search. The search giant has inked similar deals with Arizona, California, Michigan, Utah and Virginia.

Are you using day-part analysis to manage your PPC campaigns on Google? According to Amplify Interactive, you should be -- especially if you are working with a relatively small PPC budget. By figuring out what times and days of the week yield the most clicks (and conversions), search marketers gain a better idea of when to bid more to achieve higher placement, dial down bids, or even choose not to show ads at all. It's important to analyze each campaign separately, as variables like target market will likely influence which day-parts are most effective. And, …

Piggybacking on a recent MarketingSherpa presentation, Stepforth SEO's Scott outlines six tips for better-converting landing pages. The tips focus on the actual design cues of each page, from making "call-to-action" buttons big enough to be visible from a few feet away from the screen, to sticking to a 12- to 14-point black font on a white page. Scott adds that simplifying landing pages by reducing clutter and the number of columns can also lead to increased conversions. One of the most telling tips stems from MarketingSherpa data that found that some 68% of sites with landing …

Do a search for the '80s band Quiet Riot on Google and you'll find news, video, and an artist information page in the results above the fold. It's Universal Search, or "Web 3.0" hard at work -- since those results are likely more relevant than fan tribute sites or other text-only results. But Richard Burckhardt notes that five of the top six results above the fold are either Google pages, Google property (YouTube), or a Google advertising partner (MySpace) -- meaning that no matter how good a fan tribute site is SEOd, it doesn't stand a chance …

Yahoo has compiled a list of the year's top search trends, broken down into nine categories ranging from Yahoo Kids searches and queries about consumer recalls, to del.icio.us searches and more importantly, celebrity downslides. The top search terms in all categories are as follows: News - "Saddam Hussein" (a likely result of his trial and execution earlier this year); Environmental - "Recycling"; Celebrity Downslides - "Britney Spears" (no comment necessary); Technology - "YouTube"; Del.icio.us - "Design"; Consumer Recalls - "Pet food recall"; Yahoo Kids - "Games"; Sports - "NASCAR"; Send-offs - "Harry Potter." Not surprisingly, apple products …

Quintura, the visual-based, contextual-powered search engine, has been named Alternative Search Engine of the Year at Alt Search Engines. Quintura beat out 10 other competitors in a seven round selection process -- including user votes. Part of what snagged Quintura the victory was its brash corporate slogan -- "We are not afraid of Google!" -- an attitude of "alternative search engine pride" that Charles Knight says helped tip the needle. In addition, PC Magazine ranked the engine as one of the Top 25 Web sites in its June issue. Quintura was competing against user favorite Onkosh …

SLI Systems commissioned Zoomerang to study the browsing and shopping behaviors of online consumers and found that attention spans were even shorter than expected when it came to searching for info. The two companies surveyed over 500 users between the ages of 18 - 65, and over half (54%) said that they would only look through two to three pages of search results before giving up. Some 73% of respondents said they would leave an e-commerce site within one to two minutes if they could not find what they were looking for, and over a third …