Do you know the way to San Jose? The path goes through China, Japan and Latin America, at least, that's the route that part one of the "Search Around the World" panel took. T.R. Harrington tackled both the challenges and opportunities search marketers face with China--namely the fact that the PPC interfaces are not nearly as sophisticated, but the sheer volume of searchers warrant at least thinking about an international strategy. "For organic search, the wide range of differences across the Chinese provinces can prove difficult when trying to effectively translate search terms for which to optimize," Harrington said. …

Eric Enge offers examples of how to use third-party services like Hitwise to run competitive intelligence and figure out how/whether your competitors are hijacking your branded terms. In the case of Orbitz, the travel aggregator seems to be doing well, garnering about 83% of the traffic stemming from the keyword "orbitz." But what about the remaining 17%? Clearly, competitors like Travelocity and SmartFares are brand-jacking, snagging about 2% of the missing traffic each. "That's really pretty significant, since the user has probably started this search with an intent to go to the Orbitz site," he says. "All in …

The panel's title says it all: "Everything But Google: Alternative Search Marketing Options," and Darrell Long provides sound bytes as well as a bit of analysis of the session. First up was Sage Lewis, who advocated buying articles from bloggers (pay per post), as well as Quigo (a niche PPC engine), the Facebook business center, as well as traffic on Ask and Superpages.com. Meanwhile, ContextWeb's Jay Sears said that the key is to target content--not just search terms. "When you're targeting content you want to go wide versus search where you want to be as specific as possible," …

This reader-generated article focuses on keyword stuffing--and how a page that has been pumped with 254 iterations of the term "worlds greatest SEO" has still not been penalized by Google. In fact, the page ranks #1 for the term "worlds greatest SEO," which highlights the ambiguity within Google rankings. Darren Slatten developed a Web site as a gag, aiming for top rankings for the term "worlds greatest SEO." "I chose this phrase because it amuses me... plus it has virtually zero search traffic, and therefore, zero competition," he said. "In other words, simply using that phrase in my …

Barry Schwartz (aka RustyBrick) recaps the video search optimization panel, which was filled with stats and examples from case studies. For instance, Greg Jarboe found that maximizing a video's usefulness on YouTube stemmed from making it both searchable and shareable--as well as tweaking the videos that surround it. Jarboe alluded to a recently posted Allen Iverson workout video that had garnered nearly 37,000 views as of August 8--only 13% of which came from search. The majority of the other views came from somewhere else. "In this case, they came from related videos. People don't watch 'a' video, they …

Yahoo shares a wealth of usability testing data and Web site design experience with Webmasters through its new Developer Center, and Kevin Gold reviews some of the Center's offerings. "Yahoo has exposed their testing results on issues ranging from ratings and reviews, reputation, navigational structure, ad placement layouts, bead-crumb navigation best practices and wire-framing tools," he says. "In my past experience, I have spent considerable time searching for this grade of information and have often paid for best practices based on valid testing. Now it's free." For example, Yahoo has tested a number of reputation monitoring …

Since SES San Jose kicks off this week, it seems fitting to shed some light on where SES and fellow search-oriented conferences like SMX (and to a lesser extent, PubCon) seem to generate the most interest. Using Google Insights for Search, Ruud Hein uncovers that the conferences have some likely and some very unlikely geographical pockets of interest. For example, SES draws tremendous interest from Canadian, Australian and Spanish searchers--in a seemingly more concentrated manner than from searchers in the U.S. A drill down to SES San Jose shows more search interest stemming from California than any other state. …

Kyle Grant shares some insight on more robust keyword list development and refinement, acknowledging the debate on whether a campaign manager should focus on long tail or head-of-the-tail phrases for better results. He suggests looking at torso phrases first--those that are not quite expensive, broad terms, but not hyper-targeted long tail words, either--and then monitoring on as granular level as possible. "Once you know which keywords are driving highly qualified traffic in the torso, it is then possible to look at the longer-tail keywords associated with the high converting torso phrases," Grant says. Grant also advises keyword researchers …