Speculation is still swirling about whether Ask will still be a viable alternative in the core search space--and what the market would look like if the "Little Search Engine that Could" folds or hands the reigns over to Google. Loren Baker argues that a new alternative would step in to fill the void--kind of like Fox did in the '80s, when TV viewers only had the big three networks to choose from. Baker serves up a dozen alternative search engines that could feasibly pick up Ask's slack. AOL for example, has bulked up in terms of multimedia search …

Whether it's fair or not, Wikipedia pages still tend to snag high organic rankings for keywords across multiple categories. So what is it about the entries that make them so attractive to the engine's algorithms? "The English version is most people's idea of a perfectly optimised site," says Patrick Altoft. That means strong on-page SEO--like entries having engine-friendly file names, title tags and meta descriptions, not to mention the wealth of crawlable, keyword-rich text. The internal linking structure is also one of the most robust on the Web--as every entry that references another article turns the title into …

Patrick Altoft says that the key to being successful in search is to start using SEO strategies before they become popular. "For example a site that exchanged links 5 years ago now sees good rankings because of these links, while anybody building similar links this year will not see anywhere near the same effects," Altoft says. "The same applies to article and Web directory links, paid links and almost any other link you can think of." So to stay ahead of the curve and prep for a strong 2009, Altoft suggests being aggressive as possible when it comes …

Vxb.com is a California-based company that sells ball bearings. The company spends about $9,000 per month on Google, $2,000 on Yahoo and $150 on MSN--with average CPCs in the 42- to 57-cents range, and conversion rates averaging 1.5-1.9%. The Practical e-Commerce team gives Vbx.com an overall grade of "B" on its PPC Report Card, as the site only really struggled with account structure--which got a "C." Across all three engines, Vbx.com had problems when it came to breaking campaigns into groups, linking keywords to actual products in stock, and overlap of keywords across ad groups. "If you're using …

Kent Lewis boils down all his learnings from this year's SEMpdx SearchFest in Portland into 10 key points. The insights include observations from industry thought leaders, as well as random facts. For example, according to Steve Kemper, part of the reason Google has less than half the market share in China of Baidu is because "Google" is too difficult to spell in Chinese. Who knew? In terms of optimization for e-commerce sites, Aaron Kahlow said that it's better to target drop-off at the beginning of the conversion funnel as opposed to the shopping cart level. "A slight increase …

What happens when you link a personal Gmail address to an AdWords account and that account gets banned by Google for suspicious activity? You get blacklisted indefinitely, according to Jay Weintraub, and when your livelihood depends on working with Google's paid search platform, the outlook is bleak. Weintraub says that he didn't try to game the system or spam users. He simply used the same computer to work on multiple client accounts--which triggered Google's automatic account fraud detection mechanisms. And the process for clearing his name, his Gmail account and even his IP-addresses has been fraught …

YouTube users aren't just browsing randomly for videos anymore--they're using the site to search for specific clips, according to Philip Inghelbrecht, the video platform's head of strategic partner development. "This is a challenge for us because there is simply no good video search out there today," Inghelbrecht said, speaking at McGraw-Hill's Media Summit on Wednesday. "If we can't solve the search question fast enough, knowing that user behavior is shifting, that's scary." Search on YouTube now is based largely on the tags users attach to the videos, but the massive shift in user behavior is spurring …