Wired magazine and The Industry Standard Founder John Battelle sat down with HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan to talk about Google, social media and the future of search. In the video, Battelle called search a "commodity," something that "runs like water." But it's also an "interface" and the way "we interact with machines," he said. Battelle said "search will stop looking like 10 blue links and start looking like a conversation on the phone." Geographical location and mobile will enable people to interact with search more naturally.

John steps through the process to import data from your Analytics goals and transactions into AdWords conversion reports. There are four steps, which begin with ensuring you have successfully linked both services. Make sure you have turned on the feature that lets you share data under the "Edit Account and Data Sharing" setting. Once you've completed the four steps, you should see a "Conversion Tracking Notification" that lets you know "Google Analytics Goals and Transactions are now available." This allows you to link into AdWords. Track conversion performance in AdWords and use Analytics data with Conversion Optimizer.

Microsoft has launched a new MSN City Guides that integrates with Live Search and Live Search Maps, and offers video, content sharing and more. It also has better localized filtering of events and information, and one-click directions to businesses and other locations. Lisa Tiedt explains that local search results are integrated throughout the site to provide more relevant results for all ZIP codes in the U.S. Filtering capabilities will help make it easier to decide where to go based on your chosen criteria, she writes. The new version should provide give greater visibility to local businesses that both …

There has been much ado lately about mining sales funnels for data and conversions. Chris Wine believes the key to understanding the cycle is mining the data from media that consumers see or interact with further up the funnel. It still plays an important role in the final results, which means SEO professionals should consider offline media when planning online strategies. To better illustrate the fundamental shift in attributing the revenue to the media, Wine take a closer look at Extra Space Storage. He writes that the self-storage company knew many of its shoppers looked online to rent …

Have you found that Googlebot has mistakenly moved valuable pages into Google supplemental index or has passed PageRank to pages that do not need to rank? John Britsios provides insight on how to guide bots to avoid these problems. Britsios discusses when to use and not to use noindex HTML meta tags, nofollow meta tags and noindex robots.txt directives. He explains that Google (unofficially) supports the noindex robots.txt directives, but at the moment it is not supported by other search engines. "Using this directive, you can block or advise Googlebot not to index a page (or de-index a …

Mihaela Lica believes WordStream can efficiently manage huge lists of keywords. She rarely gets excited about SEO and SEM automated tools because many can do more bad than good, but seems to reluctantly agree that WordStream can become useful to anyone who wants to push their sites into the Google organic search results to generate traffic. WordStream handles keyword lists thousands or hundreds of thousands of words long, she writes. The software, based on preset parameters. segments keywords into groups that help search marketers write compelling SEO copy based on those keyword phrases that perform best, and optimize pages …

EveryZing has secured $8.25 million, with $3 million from NBC Universal's Peacock Equity, in a third round of financing. NBC has been building out its own video offering separate from Hulu and wanted closer ties to a "video SEO specialist," according to David Kaplan. The B2B-based video search engine, originally known as PodZinger in the days when podcasting emerged as a medium, once focused on a "speech-to-text" technology developed by BBN Technologies to aid advertising on audio podcasts. Later, the Cambridge, Mass., EveryZing dropped the focus on audio and branched out into video discovery for premium content.

Search engines prefer finding your site on their own, but submitting the site doesn't hurt, as long as you're careful not to overdo it. Ron Jones writes that you can check your server log for Google's robot, Googlebot, to see if Google has indexed the site. Or, type in "site:yourdomain.com" at a search prompt to see if your site has been indexed by a search engine. The latest "best practice" for submitting sites to search engines is creating and maintaining an XML sitemap for your site to point search engines toward, Jones writes. The post also includes a …

Getting listed in Google Maps may help local consumers find your business, but the listing may not reach as many searchers and Internet users as one might think. So, Joe suggests broadening the reach with AdWords' Local Business Ads, especially when looking to drive foot traffic to brick-and-mortar businesses. Google displays Local Business Ads on Google Maps, Google Earth and on the Google Network. But to run Local Business Ads, Joe explains you must first create a business listing on Google Maps. Ads displayed on Google Maps rely on the search query for location, but the Google Network …

Scientific and technical publishers might want to take notice of a search engine that can offer materials to an audience with "vast potential" and deep pockets, according to Hope Leman. In the age of Twitter, where viral marketing and micro-blogging rule, the search engine DeepDyve will become the marketer's best friend, she writes. Leman believes the site provides an untapped "educated" and "affluent" reading public with content only found in academic libraries. The site relies on landing pages made up of "clusters" and "mash-ups" of related articles and complementary biographical material. These pages allow Google to easily find …