Determining which key performance indicators (KPIs) to track is a key aspect of running an effective search campaign, so Jody Nimetz serves up a list of 40 possible stats to track. "As the online world matures and you continue to measure your online success, have you looked at your key performance indicators to see if there are any changes in how you measure your online success?" Nimetz says. For example, e-commerce sites might analyze cost per visitor or average order size/value. Bloggers may gauge average subscription length and average subscriber base. A marketer can also choose to …

Michael Gray takes Google to task on its seemingly unequivocal acceptance of Wikipedia pages as authoritative sources of info for search queries. Since the giant recently included all the Tour de France cities in its Street View roster, Gray ran a search for all 37 city keywords (sans accent, American-style) and found that an English Wikipedia entry came up as the first result in a whopping 25. Wikipedia entries actually showed up as at least one of the first ten results for all 37. What's most intriguing is that 13 of the Wikipedia entries were stubs or non-entries …

Leading Interactive Reservations, LLC, parent company of the Leading Hotels of the World brand, has chosen Didit to handle its search marketing efforts. The hotelier, which operates more than 430 properties worldwide, spends roughly $200,000 on paid search per month. Prior to choosing Didit from a roster of agencies, the company was attempting (and failing) to manage campaigns for over 150,000 keywords in-house, according to Tim Peter, Leading Interactive Reservations' managing director. Didit's team will focus on helping the hotelier's search campaign generate more reservations. "We want to break out and target the campaign bet¬ter and …

MarketingSherpa recently surveyed marketers about their most under-used campaign performance metrics when it came to search, and found that conversions and ROI came out on top. Over 40% of marketers said that they didn't track conversions (23%) or ROI (20%) for their search campaigns. It seems that while search has been lauded as one of the most accountable ad channels, a significant number of companies are not maximizing the ability to track it to actual sales (or other conversion action). "With prices rising steadily, marketers who evaluate search against tangible KPIs will be the ones who …

With a keen eye on the search industry forums, Barry Schwartz (aka RustyBrick) has uncovered what may become a major paid search marketing trend--some advertisers are starting to spend more with Microsoft's adCenter than Yahoo Search Marketing . Schwartz posts excerpts of two PPC specialist posts in the WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch forums, respectively, detailing how their adCenter budgets have gone up in recent months, completely at the expense of their YSM budgets. The shifts have occurred due to increases in adCenter campaign traffic and conversions, as well as what one specialist called "the collapse in price …

ISeeCars is the latest vertical search engine for car shoppers, with the unique angle that it actually ranks all the listings to help searchers make better decisions. The engine pulls data from multiple newspaper and dealer sites, as well as car classifieds. The ranking algorithm analyzes each listing in terms of market price comparison and the details (like the car's condition, history, mileage, warranty, etc.) to come up with a "See-First" ranking.

Aaron Wall argues that search pros that spend all their time providing client-side SEO services are a dying breed, because pure-play SEO consultancy requires too much effort for too little reward. "The best consultants could usually make more promoting their own sites and brands than they would working for clients," Wall says. One of the most common obstacles an SEO consultant comes up against is a prospective client with a poorly established brand. "Most prospective SEO customers are not ranked well because their businesses are unremarkable and have little to no competitive advantage," Wall says. "In many cases …

If you have a Web page with multiple links to another page on it, chances are, Google is only going to pay attention to the very first link it crawls. You can change the anchor tags, nofollow the first link, or otherwise try to get the "juice" to flow differently, but according to a field test by Branko Rihtman, the first link to a new domain is the only one that really counts. Rihtman's test actually piggybacks on a theory Rand Fishkin posed in an SEOmoz post back in March, but offers some concrete evidence that the first …

If you're headed to SES San Jose next month, Greg Jarboe advises you to have a game plan ready. After all, there are a total of 77 sessions, including panels, workshops and keynotes in the four-day conference, not to mention the fifth day of SEM training sessions. Using a hypothetical team of an SES newbie, an SEO specialist, a PPC specialist and an SEM vet, Jarboe outlines a plan for maximizing your conference time. For example, on the first day, you could have the SEO specialist attend the Universal & Blended Search panel, while the veteran would head …