Cross-channel integration, synergy and synchronization may seem like the buzz words du jour, but Teal explains that there are ways to ensure that your company's on- and offline marketing efforts (including search) work together, that go beyond the hype. For example, if your company (or client) is opening up a new store location, combining local offline ads with local search is a great way to gain visibility in the new neighborhood. And if your company snags a lot of print press--draft it by calling attention to the buzz on your Web site. "Integrate podcasts so potential leads can …

Google Street View may be a fun and even useful tool in many instances, but the up-close and personal detail that it offers of places (and sometimes people) has garnered scrutiny from privacy advocates around the globe. And as David Chartier notes, it doesn't help that Google seemingly violates trespassing laws to get some of the images. In April, a Pittsburgh couple sued the giant for posting images of their home on Street View, because the camera-carrying truck had to drive down a private access road to snap them. Meanwhile, community groups in California's Sonoma and Humboldt Counties …

Erick Schonfeld positions mobile search and ads provider JumpTap as a direct competitor to Google in the race to own the mobile search landscape. The company just completed a $26 million Series D round, led by Alliance Bernstein (and supplemented by companies like WPP, among others). Of course, the JumpTap team believes that they have an edge over the search giant when it comes to mobile. According to CEO Dan Olschwang, the company's search algorithm is geared toward ranking actionable results higher than others--i.e. delivering the location of the nearest drugstore when a user enters "Tylenol," as opposed …

Google announced a number of Quality Score changes last week, and Rob Weatherhead cuts through the "Google-speak" to break down what it actually means for everyday AdWords users. One of the main changes is a removal of the minimum bid--which means that advertisers will see the estimated CPC they'd have to pay to get an ad to appear on the first page of results, instead of the standard lowest-price bid they'd need to make to have the ad appear in general. The other change is a Quality Score that's determined by query level as opposed to a per keyword basis. …

What happens when you tweak title tags across a swath of pages on your Web site at the same time? Apparently, tumbling rankings, a decrease in the number of pages indexed and an ensuing slowdown in traffic, according to one Webmaster's account. Internetheaven, a WebmasterWorld forums user,explains that organic traffic to his site dropped by 65% in the wake of him changing the title tags for about 60 of the site's 250 pages. "Last week I went through about 60 of them and adjusted the title tags to something I thought would be more appropriate," he said, "E.g. …

Brandt Dainow serves up a scathing review of seven ways that search firms can under-serve or otherwise rip off their clients. He's not an "SEO sucks" kind of guy, as this article comes on the heels of one in which he extols the virtues of SEO. But Dainow explains that he received a "surprising" number of responses to the first article from readers who'd been duped by unscrupulous search firms. "People complained about SEO suppliers doing things that I thought we had long ago eliminated," he says. "I thought the marketing community had smartened up and driven the …

"Getting included in Google News can drive a ton of traffic," says Shimon Sandler, and he offers tips for getting your articles and blog posts indexed and filtered into both Google and Yahoo's SERPs with the "News" spotlight. First, make sure your story is adding info to the actual news report--for example, expert commentary or an angle that no one else has pursued. Spitting out the same stats and facts that have already been covered won't garner your piece visibility. Sandler also suggests making sure that each story has a URL that seems static (at least …

Jessica rounds up Top Rank's extensive SES San Jose coverage with this post that outlines the basics of analyzing and tracking social media efforts, starting with how to set up a social media strategy. First, you need to listen to the conversations--i.e. how people are feeling about your brand, who the most influential voices are, and where they're talking about it--to map the landscape. Then, you become part of the conversation by answering forum posts, commenting on blogs and, in some cases, developing ads that will run against the social media content. Lastly, you need to measure and …

"Having read all the hype surrounding the Search Engine Strategies event in San Jose, we jumped into the car yesterday morning excited about the prospect of discovering something new," says Julia Hyde. "Unfortunately, we were disappointed. Wandering around the event we all came to the same conclusion: Every search marketing agency sounds the same." Hyde recounts the experience she and some of the other members of the Creative Search Media team had at their first SES, including snippets from the various media kits they picked up while trolling the exhibit hall. And for the most part, she's underwhelmed by …

"Google keeps gaining search market share in the U.S., but its global dominance is not as great as previously indicated," says Erick Schonfeld. According to the latest comScore stats, the search giant's global search share actually declined by almost four points from June to July. Meanwhile, Baidu's share increased by about five points during the same time period--based almost entirely on its strength in China alone. "That makes Baidu the third largest search engine in the world after Yahoo," Schonfeld said. The market share fluctuations were largely due to changes in the way comScore measures Web …