Microsoft Wednesday said nearly 40 TV and entertainment providers, including AT&T, BBC, Comcast, HBO, Rogers, Telefónica, Televisa and Verizon will roll out entertainment services to Xbox LIVE this holiday, in more than 20 countries. The integration of new features and providers with Kinect and Xbox Live furthers Microsoft's vision to make the box an entertainment center, rather than a game console. Voice search with Bing on Xbox also allow users to search across branded services to play selected programming without a handheld device.

In a strange turn of events, Bill Slawski tells us that Google acquired patents from iLOR, the company initially used to sue Google. The patent describes a Method for Adding a User Selectable Function to a Hyperlink. Aside from detailing the patent, Slawski suggests how Google might use it today and notes that the patent changed hands on Aug. 31, recorded by the USTPO on Sept. 3.

A set of reports called Search Engine Optimization announced by Google this week can be found in the new interface under the Traffic Sources section. Cyrus Shepard explains that the setup requires a Google Webmaster account, and that the data sharing seems almost instant. He takes us through query and landing pages to provide insight on how the metrics work. Graphs accompany his descriptions to provide marketers with a more detailed explanation.

Andrea Fishman serves up critical tips to make sure tight and effective connections remain between SEO and behavioral marketing campaigns. She tells us about syncing SEO keywords with user segments, and catering messages to users. Don't get lost in custom landing pages or microsites that are completely separate from the main architecture of the company's Web site, she writes. Fishman offers alternatives and advice to maximize budgets and time.

Melissa Mackey serves up nine "not-so-great" features about Google AdWords Sitelinks. For example, marketers using free AdWords conversion tracking can forget about seeing conversion data for sitelinks. These marketers will need to track conversions via Web analytics software. Also, there is no click-data for individual URLs. The insights are intended to inform and prepare marketers that want to use the tool.

Parks Associates estimates the number of smartphone users will reach 1 billion by 2014, according to Tope Abayomi. He provides three mobile data categories that marketers may want to use, methods on how to capture and analyze each one, and examples of user behavior and mobile event tracking to get started.

Landing page organization could become one of the most important tasks to turn site visitors into long-term, loyal consumers. It's the first page that many people see, and making a good impression becomes critical. Among the tips, Tim Ash tells marketers to keep important information above the fold, avoid stop signs and animation, connect with color, and choose images that support visitor tasks.

Bill Slawski tells us about more patents that Google acquired from IBM in September. The list includes one filed in 1996 that uses an API and a java applet. Others include file archiving approaches, distributed database information systems, encryption, user authentication, and managing configurations of computer systems, according to Slawski. He outlines most of them in the post, along with an abstract description.

Google added an "ad position parameter" to ValueTrack capabilities a little more than a month ago, which enables marketers to see specific position of all ad clicks. Mark Ballard's initial review focused on how click volume varies by position for specific keywords. For the test, Ballard explains the method and the findings. For starters, his team looked at four weeks of sample click and conversion data restricted to ads appearing on Google.com and keywords that did not include client brand names. The results may surprise marketers.

Ted Ives looks at SEO through a psychological perspective by describing a book -- Ending the Management Illusion -- that focuses on forecasts, which he believes remain a critical part of the SEO process. What is the potential for a Web site, and what efforts contribute to and constitute a reasonable amount of time spent on SEO? With the author's permission, he has reproduced a table in the book that illustrates behavioral bias, with an additional column that suggests how these biases are relevant to search.