Andrea Harris sums up some key takeaways from SMX Advanced for in-house search pros, with quick hits focusing mostly on SEO. For example, attendees learned that Yahoo has improved the way it crawls and indexes XML sitemaps. "If your Yahoo! sitemaps failed in the past, you may want to resubmit them," she says. Meanwhile, if you acquire a domain and don't want its PageRank to be reset, don't update the host, DNS setting and content all it once. Change components gradually to avoid having all of the previous positive SEO efforts wiped out. And for paid search, …

"I just realized we're in an SEO bubble," says Ian Lurie. "There's been an explosion of SEO consultants, companies, books, conferences, etc. Everyone's cashing in." While Lurie acknowledges that he's not the first blogger/pundit to make this argument, he does try to move the discussion forward by forecasting the possible ways that the search bubble might pop. First, there's the idea of a "slow meltdown" in which more companies move SEO in-house and search tactics and techniques become common knowledge. "The bigger agencies will either adapt and learn to work with many smaller accounts or die," Lurie …

Avinaush Kaushik outlines a few ways that Webmasters can use Google Trends for competitive analysis, starting with gauging how much of a competitor's traffic is home-grown versus international. For example, a peek at the traffic for WebTrends (webtrends.com) shows a downward slope in terms of U.S. traffic year-over-year. But when the settings are shifted to All Regions, the downward trend has lessened--reflecting a stronger market overall. Further breakdown of the data shows that while the majority of WebTrends' traffic is U.S.-based, the site has seen a strong surge of visitors from India. "The thing to do is correlate …

Heather Donohue blogs about Hitwise's latest monthly search market share report--noting that not much has changed. Google is still in the top spot, followed by Yahoo, Live Search and Ask. So where's the news? Well, Google's share of search has hit a new milestone--just slightly over 70% (70.77%, to be exact). Donohue attributes Google's sustained growth to a number of factors, including increased traffic and better searcher retention. "Looking back over the past 13 months, in addition to the growing share of searches, traffic to Google has continued to increase," she says. "The market share of visits to …

Jeff Meundel trains a search pro's eye on the Web site of Little Pixie Gifts, a baby-oriented gift retailer, and finds that when it comes to SEO, "Little Pixie has big SEO potential." He gives the site an overall score of B-. Muendel says that the site scores points for its correct usage of a sitemap on the homepage--as well as the minimalistic design of said sitemap. "Littlepixiegifts.com.au not only has a link to their sitemap, but it also has an ideal sitemap design," he says. "Major categories and subcategories are listed logistically with textual links, but it …

Sites that make use of a site search tool have a definite advantage when it comes to consumer insights, since, as Caitlin Minteer notes, "you can gain valuable insights into what your visitor is thinking, by actually having them tell you!" And Minteer outlines a number of ways to dig into site search data as provided by a tool like Google's Custom Search Engine. For example, paying attention to the page where visitors start their site search (i.e., the start page) can shed light on pages that are confusing, don't contain enough relevant info, or even have …