There are plenty of search marketing training courses, but with this post, the Vertical Measures team focuses on the programs that can help you upgrade your link-building skills, starting with We Build Pages--a firm that offers one- or two-day seminars that give a "solid overview of the link building process," as well as the basics of SEO and rankings. "This is ideal for companies who want to build 'in house' programs," the team says. Meanwhile, Justilien Gaspard offers one-on-one training that "focuses heavily on link building" and topics like email campaigns and link bait, with "lots of in-depth discussion …

The majority of user-facing video search engines rely on user tags to index, crawl and return relevant results. If a user (or group of users) has wrongly identified a video, then it will likely show up for the wrong query. Pluggd tries to circumvent that issue by analyzing the actual video content and making it searchable by keyword. Seattle-based Pluggd converts the audio in each video to text and then indexes it via keyword and context. Users that run a Pluggd video search will find a heatmap-style display of videos that pertain to their query. "The color code on …

Bryan Eisenberg takes the concept of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and uses it to explain the Hierarchy of Optimization when it comes to a Web site. Shaped like a pyramid, the optimization hierarchy includes factors like whether a site is usable, intuitive and persuasive. Like Maslow, Eisenberg lists the most vital and critical needs at the bottom of the pyramid--starting with a Web site's functionality. Fix any issues related to a site's functionality first. Whether it's 404 not found pages or a broken shopping cart feature, these obstacles almost guarantee that consumers will not convert--or worse, head over to …

Mobile search is still a relatively nascent field, but as Bryson Meunier highlights, there are a number of tools that mobile SEOs can use to track and analyze their client's mobile search traffic--and they go way beyond Google Analytics or any other Web analytics program that's hijacked for mobile. "Traditional Web analytics either use JavaScript, cookies or log files to track users, and all of these methods can cause problems for mobile browsers," Meunier says. "Aside from the fact that data that results from these tracking methods is incomplete or inaccurate, it's not currently possible for mobile search optimizers …

comScore's most recent paid search traffic report may have sparked a bit of paranoia about the stability of Google (and search in general) on Wall Street, but search firms like the Rimm-Kaufman Group continue to release stats that prove the giant is still on top when it comes to paid search--and that the market itself is quite healthy. For example, from January to February, Google picked up 2.3 points of the Group's clients' ad spend--directly at the expense of Yahoo (down by 1.6 points), MSN (down by 0.6 points) and Ask (down by 0.1 points). Meanwhile, same-client spend on …