Matthew Mierzejewski tells us why it's important to bid on and buy brand-name keywords in paid-search ad campaigns -- not only for better performance, but as a way to ward off the competition and ensure that every person searching for the brand by name ends up on the company's site. He provides an example using Bath and Body Works, and suggests this strategy particularly when optimizing sites for second-tier search engines.

MileWise, which allows travelers to find flights they can purchase with cash, airline miles or hotel and credit card points, now shows results for Chase, Citi, and Capital One credit cards, adding to American Express and Starwood. Aside from price, airline, and schedules, MileWise factors rewards points into query rankings to find the best deals. A one-on-one interview with co-founder Sanjay Kothari reveals the company's finance strategy, a look into the business model, and what's next for the travel-focused search engine.

Google plans to add support during the next few weeks for alternative names -- nicknames, maiden names, or names in other scripts -- alongside common names. Bradley Horowitz wrote in a Google+ post that based on feedback from the 1% of potential Google+ users appealing denials of profile names, some just want to add a nickname. In fact, 60% of these users want to add nicknames. About 20% of appeals are businesses attempting to set up their business as a Profile, rather than using Google+ Pages. And the remaining 20% either prefer to use a pseudonym or another unconventional …

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has added free Android and iPhone apps to connect with the MIT libraries. The app provides a direct connnection to library services, such as searching for and requesting books and managing accounts for books checked out, as well as asking questions, submitting comments or requesting a meeting with a librarian.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers presented a new algorithm this week at the Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) that could be used for image compression of large video files required to wirelessly transmit to smartphones without draining battery life or counsuming an overabundance of bandwidth. The algorithm supports the Fourier transform concept, described as fundamental in information sciences. While it's universal in signal processing, it can also be used to compress image and audio files, solve differential equations and price stock options, and more.

Can search retargeting save a more-than-100-year-old iconic company from its demise? Ben Piomion thinks so -- and he has put together five strategies he believes will help allocate budgets better to produce a more positive return on investment. One example illustrates his point by highlighting costs for the keyword phrase "digital camera" and explaining how display retargeting only serves ads to people who already went to a search engine or landed on a site related to the targeted keywords.  

Linkbait, social weight and signals, rich snippet markup, Google+, and creative and inspiring ideas that can help marketers gain the success they seek from search markeing campaigns will become essential tools this year, according to Geoff Jackson. He takes us through each and explains why these five stand out and how marketers can use them. 

A patent application describing Apple's automated voice assistant points to more than search on the iPhone 4S. It describes how such a system could be used in a number of ways, including with mobile phones, PDAs, tablets, game consoles, and embedded computer systems in cars, according to Bill Slawski. He explains how the technology could combine natural-language dialog with a graphical user interface to search, navigate, provide weather conditions, manage reminders and alerts, and more.

Tweaks made to the Desktop Editor in AdWords Campaign Experiments now enable marketers to set test parameters and apply them to a given campaign a little more easily. This helps marketers to optimize performance in a more controlled way, according to Kayla Kurtz. She takes us through the process of setting up an experiment, explaining how to set parameters and controls, defining changes, and supporting changes in Editor.

<p>Rand Fishkin offers up advice and strategies to help pages with boring content to rank well. These are not the pages that convert into sales, but rather product description pages that hopefully lead to sales. Fishkin suggests taking the technical specs on the product page and combining them with the comments on the page that convert well, using a 301 redirect from the page that ranks well to the page that doesn't. The video also provides other tips.</p>