Online reputation management has seemingly morphed into one of the (many) disciplines that search pros need to have a grip on, so keeping on the lookout for new review or gripe sites is a must. Ann Smarty examines three sites that angry customers can go to and voice their frustration publicly--and grades the organic search damage potential of each. DontDateHimGirl.com is an online community where women can share stories about their cheating (or otherwise awful) boyfriends. While the site is more personal than business-oriented, if a member publicizes her ex's company name and job title along with his …

Microsoft has upgraded the Live Search homepage, featuring high-quality photographs as background images and "hotspots" that highlight specific sections that get moused-over. According to Chris Rayner and Zack Gutt, Live Search senior product and senior program managers, respectively, the team tested the enhancements with a select group of users before rolling them out full scale. "Our goal for the home page is to find the best way to enhance users' sense of discovery, surprise, and delight while balancing engineering realities for a great user experience," Rayner and Gutt said. "We want the page to be a great place …

Ritesh Gupta interviews Barbara Pezzi, director of Webmarketing and E-commerce at Swissotel Hotels & Resorts, offering insight into the way hoteliers and other travel advertisers are utilizing search and social media. For organic search, Pezzi said that Swissotel had recently revamped its Web site with SEO in mind. She also said that the company's strategy was to target a mix of broad and long tail keywords--while always keeping one eye on the budget and the upscale perception of the brand. And she advocated use of negative keywords. "I always include a high number of negative keywords in …

Tired of plain old, phrase- and term-based keyword research? Why not include URLs in your list of target keyphrases? As Patrick Altoft notes, the trend of entering whole or partial URLs into the search bar (as opposed to the address bar) doesn't show any signs of stopping, so taking advantage of this searcher tendency could lead to a competitive advantage. "Ranking highly for popular URL's can send a huge amount of traffic and is a great way to target your competitor's customers," Altoft says. "For example if you saw your competitor running a newspaper advert with a URL such …

Lance Neuhauser poses the question of whether too many marketers are focusing on targeting the long tail in lieu of doing the work (and reaping the rewards) that stem from high-impact, high-volume "head" search placements. He argues that the amount of time it takes to research, develop and test 20+ long-tail ads could be wasted when compared to the amount of time it would take to do the same for far fewer ads that target the head. Particularly when those head of the tail ads can garner greater visibility and greater numbers of conversions. "Remember that …

The E-Consultancy team plucks a page from their "Paid Search Marketing Best Practice Guide" to offer a dozen landing page creation tips. The tips range from crafting relevant pages with clear headlines and easy-to-scan blocks of text, to providing the right balance of product detail and brevity. Meanwhile, menu and navigation decisions will depend on whether you want to give visitors the option to delve into other areas of the site. "This is debatable; removing menu options can increase conversion rates since users have a smaller choice of where to click, but this will prevent visitors who don't …

John Andrews digs into Marchex's latest announcement that it is now offering small business owners comprehensive local online marketing and lead generation services--including paid search and SEO'd site development. He throws up the caution flags however, arguing that handing all of said business over to one company (or two, if you include the agency that initially creates an SMB's Web site) is foolish. "You must own your website and your lead gen channel, or at least own a point of leverage for that channel," Andrews says. "You must control your public profile, and you must own the revenue …

Together, Google and Yahoo have spent $1.36 million on lobbying for various issues in D.C., and that's just for the second quarter of 2008! Of course, one of the primary causes was their proposed paid search deal, but both giants also pushed to support more altruistic legislation. Google, for example, spent some $730,000 on causes ranging from measures designed to protect children from online predators, spyware crackdown proposals, as well as net neutrality. It's worth noting that Big G spent more on lobbying in the first two quarters of 2008 than in all of 2007. Meanwhile, …