French search engine company 1plusV, the creator of Ejustice.fr, a site dedicated to law searches, held a press conference in Brussels earlier this week to announce it filed a complaint with the European Union about Google abusing its market position. That complaint gathered support from two other companies: Ciao.de, a German subsidiary of Microsoft, and Foundem.co.uk, a U.K. price-comparison site, explains Alessandro Torello.

Search engine marketers will need to know social marketing tactics. There's no getting around it as Google increasingly integrates social signals into search. Liana Evans serves up details on research tools for social media strategies. Here are 10 buzz-monitoring and research tools every search marketers should know.

Michael Gray suggests making footers more dynamic to attract the correct Web site traffic. He suggests selecting the most recent posts from a specific category. Among the reasons--keeping the content current for search engines and site visitors. He also describes the tasks WordPress typically handles and the tasks SEO professionals need to concentrate on.

Stoney deGeyter covers many of the basic questions, such as which benefits a SEO strategy more, on-page SEO or link building? This year will bring a lot of changes to search engine optimization including the integration of social signals in search engine organic rankings,. he notes

After a six-year stint at the New York Times as director of the paper's search engine strategies, Matthew Brown left to start AudienceWise, a search marketing company based in Portland, Ore. He discusses SEO for large corporations with Todd Mintz. Sometimes it's not easy, Brown explains, because either clients don't understand or don't have the time to listen to the techniques and/or suggestions. For instance, the company's tech group might learn how Google has a plan to crawl AJAX, but it's up to the SEO professional to assess whether that undertaking is worth it and then communicate the idea …

Ann Smarty describes WhoICompete, a free tool to generate the list of your strongest competitors in Google, and then links to a post from Andrew Griffiths, who adds his two cents about a free tool that requires no registration to use, but provides lists of top search competitors.

Geno Prussakov describes two Twitter tools Twiangulate, and MentionMap,that "help you find very interesting people to follow on Twitter." Each creates maps of relationships. While one allow users to measure many influencers simultaneously, the only focuses on one at a time.

Don't "fixate" on keyword rankings, write Rob Chant, who tell us what can happen when SEO professionals focus all their attention on this area -- and then explains what SEOs should do instead. For example, there's working with a range of keywords that can generate increased traffic depending on a business.

There's an ongoing debate on how much influence social signals will have on organic search engine rankings. Jennifer Sable Lopez monitors an unexpected Twitter tweet to determine the outcome. She describes how the signals make the rankings fluctuate, and provides screen shots to help marketers visualize the process and the outcome.

Simone Schuurer writes "like relatives suffering from sibling rivalry," search and social will become the much-talked-about strategy in 2011. So, she provides insights on how to implement both through tips on SEO, paid search, social media and combining all three.