So Google's stock tumbled by 160 points this week, after Nielsen's latest search share report showed that the giant's chokehold on the market loosened from 57% to 56% in December. Yikes! The sky is falling! Team Google must be too focused on building an online/offline marketing dashboard, growing YouTube and saving the planet from global warming--and they're forgetting about the core search property, right? Not quite. Andrew at OneUpWeb posted Nielsen search share data for the past six months and found that Google's chokehold actually grew tighter in the long run, as the giant gained 3% of market …

The Vertical Measures team is serious about the practice of link building--so much so, that they've devoted an entire blog to it. This post focuses on developing a balanced link-building campaign, which includes targeting directories with real editors (people that ensure the content stays updated), as well as forums, which the team calls "the virtual water cooler." It's also important to find a few partners for reciprocal links, and to use social media for contextual links from blogs and reviews. But a balanced link building campaign isn't just about variety, it's about consistently being a source of fresh, …

Twingly is a soon-to-be-launched Eurocentric blog search engine, and while Michael Arrington notes just how hard it may be to break into the U.S. blog search market, the new service has some features that may help separate it from the pack. While Google has stepped up its blog indexing service, often visiting the same blog multiple times as new content gets produced, the engine casts such a wide net that the quality of the results varies greatly. The same goes for Technocrati, which is by far the most popular blog search engine in terms of unique visitors, according to …

Are you helping your clients understand how seasonality and factors like breaking news are affecting the amount of site traffic they're receiving? Janet Driscoll Miller offers a quick brush-up on how using tools like Yahoo Buzz and Google Trends can be a great way to illustrate the correlation between news stories and search volume. Monday was the MLK holiday, so naturally, searches for "Martin Luther King" spiked, but just two days later "Heath Ledger" took the lion's share of searches, after news of the actor's death hit the wires. If your client had blog posts or other content …

Microsoft has steadily been upgrading adCenter to make the platform easier to use and more compatible with Google and Yahoo's search marketing interfaces, but there are still some kinks to work out--particularly with bulk uploading, as Hanapin Marketing's Joe illustrates. When trying to upload numerous changes to your account or import campaigns from the other search engines, make sure to use the template MSN provides and that your columns are in order. Too many or too few columns and the upload won't work. Forget about using the import feature for uploading negative keywords. In Joe's experience, …

Most on-page optimization tactics focus on things like keyword density to boost SERP rankings, but Hamlet Batista says that increasing organic CTRs starts with optimizing for your searchers, not the engines, first. "It is possible for sites ranking slightly lower to get more clicks than the ones at the top," Batista says, and it starts with writing page titles and descriptions that will draw searchers in. Instead of plugging page titles with every keyword possible, think of writing them as you would the tagline for a paid search ad--brief, persuasive and focused. Use the anchor text to alert the …

Cesar Mascaraque, Google's head of strategic partnerships and business development for southern Europe, is packing his bags and heading for Ask. As of Feb. 4, Mascaraque will lead Ask's entire European division as managing director, replacing Myles Runham, who is leaving the company. In a statement, Mascaraque said that it was an exciting time to join the fastest growing search engine, and that he was looking forward to working with all of Ask's international teams. "I have watched the brand set itself apart by pioneering new products and offering innovative ways of bringing search to users," he said.

In the past few days, numerous bloggers have posted about some major changes to the way Google includes local and map results in the SERPs--and while the giant is constantly tweaking the organic listings, the changes to the OneBox info seem to be sticking. Local listings can now take up to 10 spots in the OneBox--which formerly held data for just one business, including its position on the map, a URL and address and telephone info--hence the name, OneBox. It expanded to three listings last year, and now with 10 listings, the area of coverage by the …

Site owners have an obligation to ensure that their Web site is accessible to Internet users with disabilities, and the increased use of the mobile Web makes that lowest-common-denominator access doubly important. Stoney deGeyter lists some features that you should check to make sure that all users can get to the info on your site, starting with the doctype declaration. Browsers use the doctype info to identify which version of HTML your site is coded in, so each page should specify this information. If you use Cascading style sheets (CSS) to give your site a uniform look and …

Rumors of Yahoo's imminent layoffs started as whispers on the blogosphere Monday, but now they've grown into roars by major media outlets like TheNew York Times and The Wall Street Journal. What's known is that CEO Jerry Yang has to shed some blood to bolster Yahoo's position with shareholders and financial analysts; what's not known is just how many heads will have to roll. Some have pegged the number at about 500 layoffs, while others have speculated 1,500 or more (roughly 10% of the Web giant's workforce). Erick Schonfeld says that while it may be hard to …