With the Summer Olympics in full swing, OneUpWeb's Alex analyzes the search enhancements offered by each of the engines and crowns Live Search the king. "In my opinion, the search engine that displays the most information and provides the easiest access to medal coverage, videos, and news articles is Live Search," he says. As Around the Net in Search covered last week, Microsoft has packed Live Search with Olympics-themed news, video clips, and the medal count table--and it's all available before searchers even run a query. Google also offers medal count info, news and even boasts a mobile site, …

"If you're relatively new to SEO or just about to undertake SEO on your Web site for the first time, you're likely looking for some key resources," says Julie Batten. And she offers the lowdown on 10 essential tools any search newcomer can use to make the optimization process easier and more effective. First up are the content and site usability guidelines as put forth by the engines themselves, that is, Google Webmaster Guidelines, Yahoo Search Content Quality Guidelines and MSN Guidelines for Successful Indexing. She provides links to all three. There are also links to …

Figuring out someone's strengths and having them work on projects that maximize those strengths is a win-win for both employers and employees. The employee's morale gets a boost, the employer gets high-quality productivity, and the company is better off. So what strengths should HR managers be looking for in potential search employees? Search workers should be maximizers obsessed with making things excellent. "This one's a no-brainer for all analytics-based marketing," Brian Carter says. The new addition to your search team should also have a strong ability to focus, be strategic and have a knack for arranging things (like …

Jeff Quipp kicks off a new series of blog posts focused on iPhone-centric SEO with this first tip: Include your company's phone number in the meta description tag. If you do so, "the iPhone turns the phone number into a link," he says. "Click it, and the number is dialed ... no memorization necessary. Almost instant gratification, and in this world, instant gratification rules!" Quipp says that this tip would likely best benefit local businesses, emergency services (like tow truck and locksmiths), as well as businesses that would fit under the impulse or on-demand category (like …

In the search world, there's crawling and there's indexing. The two terms denote important actions taken by the engines, but Erik Dafforn thinks that they've been used interchangeably as of late. And since they're not the same thing, he devoted a blog post to explaining how they differ. "Crawling is the process of an engine requesting -- and successfully downloading -- a unique URL," he says. "Indexing is the result of successful crawling. I consider a URL to be indexed (by Google) when an info: or cache: query produces a result, signifying the URL's presence in the Google …

Aaron Goldman uses a recent Search Engine Watch article titled "Avoiding Online Missteps with Generation Y and Milleniums" as an example of how time spent on title optimization can have a significant impact on a page's visibility in the engines. While the article focuses on using the Web to market to millenials, Goldman notes that searchers on the hunt for said info likely won't find it during a routine search, because the piece is not optimized for the right words. "It's not because of the page template," he says. "The headline of the article is repeated in the …

Mitch Joel reviews five free reputation-monitoring tools, including Google Alerts, Twitter and Facebook Lexicon, as you can never be too aware of what consumers are saying (and seeing) about your or your client's brand. "We now live in a day and age where almost every first (and ongoing) brand interaction happens at the search box," Joel says. "Think about the last time someone told you about a brand. Odds are you did not rush down to the nearest store to check it out. You probably did a quick search online to see what's being said and read what …