Changes in search engine algorithms challenge SEOs to come up with new ways to improve the ability to generate traffic and the experience for site visitors. Leverage user-generated content, watch the homepage title in Google search engine results pages, and improve Web site speeds are three of the six recommendations Richard Baxter makes to improve an SEO strategy.

Twitter's new search architecture took the company's search gurus about six months to build. They built it on an efficient inverted index rather than a relational database. They chose to start with Lucene, a search engine library written in Java. More than 1,000 tweets and 12,000 queries per second, equaling more than 1 billion queries per day, put a heavy load on machines, so the new system must last for several years.

The BBC spent about £1.4 million on digital display advertising and £220,000 on paid-search marketing in the financial year ending March 2010, according to Josh Halliday. He tells us that earlier this month, the BBC launched a major advertising campaign to promote its new-look iPlayer catchup service.

Google was granted a patent this week on a product intended to make the mobile Web a little faster by compressing URLs to be displayed on mobile devices,according to Bill Slawski. He tells us the premise of the shorter URLs, points to a YouTube interview with the inventors listed on the Google patent, and provides insight into the patent description.

The goals of SEO today are visibility, traffic and conversion, writes Jessica Lee, who gives us the Cliff Notes from a recent article titled "Retooling the SEO Tool Belt" written by Bruce Clay. In the article, Clays points to the major changes occurring in search engines that make rankings a complicated task.

Meg Whitman may have spent $140 million in ad campaigns for the California governor's race, but we've seen only glimpses of her online campaign ad strategy, according to Kate Kaye. What we have seen emerged on sites like Pandora, as well as Google AdWords and Facebook. Kaye brings up a good point -- that this campaign has all the ingredients for digital experimentation. Not only is Whitman's campaign fueled by personal wealth, but the candidate offers tech-savvy voters a chance for California to move ahead and lead once again.

Kristine Schachinger shows us how someone can intercept a Twitter direct message. In fact, it's a lot easier than "taking candy from a baby," she explains. When someone agrees to allow access to log in, they also agree to let the developer who created the log-in access to your direct messages. She points to an article by Gary Adam Shannon that explains how it works.

Mike Fleming summarizes an episode of PPC Rockstars' David and Howie that focuses on a better way to write and test ads against the competition. For starters, think about the emotional and the long-term benefits for those searching for products and services, because the most important point when people make decisions is the context in which they make them. The decision to purchase is based on available options.

If you think Google owns advertising on the Web, wait until the company begins to sell Google TV to the masses. Alan Bleiweiss confirms what I've been thinking all along: Google TV can do what Nielsen could never do. Rather than simply track TV viewing habits and collecting and selling data on viewer eyeballs, Google would push out its own ads, and sell the rights to broadcast on the platform. While Amazon, Netflix and the NBA create Google-TV-friendly versions of their Web sites, how will Google TV influence SEO on the Web?

There are some cases when Google Instant ignores special characters from queries. So, people can't search for :) or x^2, but there are exceptions such as (c#, c++), according to Alex Chitu. He tells us how to find query results for those who need to know :).