Danny Sullivan is a firm believer that one month's search market share report from one vendor does not guarantee an accurate view of the "state of the search market." Examining the engine's performance across measurement firms over time provides a more holistic view, he says, and does so in this post. The charts provided offer a view of the Big Three from June 2007 through March 2008 for both market share and search volume, using stats from comScore, Nielsen, Hitwise and even Compete. And while some trends (i.e. Google retaining its search market dominance) were obvious, what became …

Google's strong first-quarter results showed that the search giant's constant focus on improving core search has been a stellar strategy. Gordon Choi illustrates the many changes that Google has made in recent months to the search user interface, starting with the flexible search box. When searching on Google.com, the box extends to fit the size of a user's query. Meanwhile, Related searches and Related phrases show up at the bottom of the search box, features that Choi says "are certainly for increasing stickiness." The recently launched Site Search also boosts stickiness, as users can search within a brand's …

Small-business owners often don't have the time to craft Web site content just for the sake of SEO, and panelists at the "Keywords and Content" session at the Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference in Houston said that the most engine-friendly content may not be in the user's best interest, either. "Search engines don't pay your bills, but your prospects and customers do," said Heather Lloyd-Martin, the president and CEO of SuccessWorks Search Marketing Solutions. So while building a keyword-dense site may be appealing to Google--it may actually drive consumers away. Lloyd-Martin said balance is key--i.e. slipping in two …

Mark Jackson says there are four SEO essentials to keep in mind when planning a site redesign--the information architecture, the URL structure and page design, the content and of course, the launch itself. Tie the site's overall architecture to keyword research. The marketing department may have some ideas on which keywords attract which consumers, but "make sure you're building a Web site that actually has pages devoted to the keywords," Jackson says. The content management system (CMS) in place needs to jive with SEO, as sometimes these platforms can create long, non-search friendly URLs and page …

Navneet Kaushal reviews W3Counter, another Google Analytics challenger--with a free suite available for site owners that receive less than 5,000 daily page views. W3Counter offers more than 30 real-time reports, including a Live Visitor Map, so Webmasters can find the locations of visitors from around the globe when they're on the site. In addition to the standard analytics tools of visit origination and navigation-path tracking, W3Counter's dashboard interface allows site owners to compare components like search phrases and page view activity for the previous two weeks on a site-by-site basis. W3Counter also supports the Feedburner API to track …

Stumped for ways to increase traffic to a well-established site? Rob Wood suggests creating a "What's New" or "New Products" page. "Site visitors like to see what is new, trendy, or just released," Wood says. "Make it easy for them." Always include a "forward to friend" option in your email correspondence with consumers, as this helps boost the viral power of an ad campaign or promotion. If you can sustain the pace, Wood says to try adding new content on a daily basis, be it via blog, press release or outsourced articles. You can also rope users into …

The 5.2 magnitude earthquake that rocked the Midwest last week was big news--and with more Americans turning to search as their first breaking news source, Danny Sullivan checked to see how each of the engines fared in terms of coverage. Google trumped Yahoo, MSN and Ask in general searches for "earthquake," as the giant was the only engine that had current news at the top of the results. MSN had a "Recent Earthquakes" refiner on the right side of the page, but still only offered info on quakes in California and Nevada after it was clicked. Searching …