Chad Frederiksen takes "mortgages," a highly-competitive search term, and checks to see what the landing pages look like for some of the top-ranked ads. In the ensuing face-off, Frederiksen gives the landing page for GMAC an A+. "This page is very focused, it shows the current rate in large numbers, a big red 'get started' button, a quick testimonial quote, even a smiling happy family with a dog," he says. On the other hand, the landing page for Home Finance of America gets a D. "This page is cluttered, unfocused and leaves no clear call to action," Frederiksen says. …

"SurfCanyon is a Firefox plug-in that claims mind reading capabilities," says the Pandia team. "Even though there's no actual magic involved, this nifty little app does a great job of digging though the search results for the hits you need, even though Google buried them on page 12." The tool re-ranks search results from Google, Yahoo and MSN as determined by your own behavior, with the help of small bull's eye icons next to each result. Click the bull's eye and SurfCanyon digs to retrieve more results that are just like it. If none of the choices are …

Google's top brass have maintained that the search giant doesn't use brand advertising to market itself to consumers--instead, choosing to use direct advertising to entice small and large businesses to use its products. But as John Battelle notes, times are a-changin' in Mountain View. Spotted recently at a Giant's baseball game was an ad for Google Maps "on the strip of LEDs that festoon the upper decks," Battelle says. "You might call it a non-cpc banner display ad in the middle of the web site that is AT&T Park." Reader comments also shed light on Google's recent …

Recent comScore data found that Web users worldwide conduct over 500 million searches for dictionary, thesaurus and encyclopedia queries each month--up 20% from last year. That high volume of Q&A-style searching provides a window into the motives behind Ask's purchase of Dictionary.com parent company Lexico. The deal is expected to grow Ask Network's user base by 11%, and increase its unique visitor count to over 145 million per month. It also make sense given that about 30% of all searches on Ask currently fall under the reference category.

While the idea of developing fresh, interesting content is a publishing standard, crafting copy for the Web is quite different than writing an article for print. "Experienced publishers will have to agree that clarity and simplicity do not mean the same as they did in the past," says Adam Nowak. "Filling in a website with text is against the rules and principles which they regarded as a strong point of their work until now." Internet users most often scan content before choosing to read, so Nowak suggests including headlines and subheadings liberally, as well as using bulleted lists …

The latest Hitwise data shows that Google's search market share is at an all-time high. Of course, that means that market share for Yahoo and MSN hit new lows -- which, as Thomas Claburn notes, is precisely why some in the industry remain concerned about the search giant's dominance. Still, Claburn argues that while Google's chokehold on search is formidable, on some levels, it's beneficial for the entire Internet marketing and computing industries. "Google is alarming in the same way that Wal-Mart is alarming: It forces competitors to change," Claburn says. He says that there's still …

Online retailers face some of the most nagging duplicate content issues because by default, there may be three, 300, or 3,000 competitors shilling the same product that they do. With 300 product pages highlighting the "Belkin 715 Rewritable Disk Drive," how is a search engine supposed to differentiate--let alone rank--which one is most relevant for a query? Brian R. Brown says that e-tailers have to choose the products, pages and keywords that they want to rank most highly for and lavish them with attention. Try adding customer testimonials or reviews to these pages, or developing custom introductory or …

Jeremy Schoemaker has a love/hate relationship with the practice of SEO (and by default, many of its practitioners), but this post swings to the friendly side of the spectrum. Schoemaker asked a number of search pros for their definition of SEO, promising to leave out his own snarky commentary. What he got was almost 20 answers that vary based on the respondents' level of expertise and the kind of firm (core search, interactive marketing, etc.) they come from. For example, Clientside's Todd Malicoat says that: "SEO is an evolving marketing school of thought born from the desire to …

A new feature in the AdWords conversion tracking repertoire allows advertisers to define the actions that are most important to their business (i.e. a lead, a purchase, or a sign-up, etc.) and track them independently. Previously, AdWords users could only track conversions as a cumulative total of actions. Now, you can create separate actions for each conversion type--for example, you can track "graduation bouquets" under the "purchase/sale" heading, or "monthly coupon newsletter" under the "sign-up" heading. "If you need more detailed data, you can attribute values to each action," says John Lee. "By dictating this value, …