Kane Jamison tells us that hosting an event can become one of the best link-building strategies. The lengthy post guides us through the strategy of how to structure event pages, use search queries to find event listing opportunities, competitive analysis, advanced tactics, and more. 

Fritz Lanman, a former senior director at Microsoft and an investor in Pinterest, Square, Chartbeat, and other startups, launched the iPhone app called Livestar. The application allows users to see reviews for restaurants, movies, and music from friends and trusted newspapers and blogs. Eventually, the app will also include categories like TV shows, apps, books, apparel, and wine, according to Sean Ludwig.

Don't try to fool consumers into clicking on paid-search ads. Marketers will only anger potential buyers and lose potential brand advocates. Kayla Kurtz suggests trying calls to action that don't directly call for an action, but rather imply an action. For example, adding sitelinks to an organic listing tells searchers they can find the information in a specific subcategory. Adding call extensions creates an indirect way of asking searchers to call you in lieu of clicking, she explains. Kurtz suppllies a list of possible ways to indirectly add the call to action, such as "discover your" or "read our reviews." 

For those who want to avoid driving down Web site visitor traffic, Zach Bulygo offers up a list of nine tactics to avoid. He shares ideas and insights about the things that send users running from Web sites -- all of which he explains marketers have the means to reverse, such as painless sign-up forms or download options. Site owners might want to use this option as a way to collect audience segment data -- but if they make the list of information too long, the site visitor will abandon the quest for more information and jump.

Nicole O'Connell needed to reduce the cost per lead for search campaigns at Loyola University. While the model might not work for all companies or organizations, the case study explains how she accomplished the task with help from a team at WSI Digital Marketing who restructured all search marketing campaigns, using Kenshoo Editor and Keyword Tool, adding thousands of new keywords before implementing Kenshoo's cost-per-action (CPA)-based bid policies.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau said Thursday that Google Product Manager Jonathan Bellack and Rubicon Project SVP Jay Sears will co-chair the Advertising Technology Council. The new group created in February aims to help those who support the online ad industry understand how advertising technologies can work together. The co-chairs will lead a group to develop technical standards and operating best practices that combine the fragmented advertising technology business.

In a show of power by an engine, Google is threatening to take action against a popular site that converts YouTube videos into MP3 files -- YouTube-MP3.org. The site pulls in 1.3 million visitors every day, extracts MP3 audio from YouTube videos and makes it available for users to download, according to TorrentFreak. The site reports that many young people convert these files and listen to them on their mobile phones. 

Social signals continue to play a more important role in search engine rankings, but David Harry suggests embracing the concept because it makes sense to marketing business strategy, "not because it has magical ranking powers." In a detailed post about signals and ranking factors, Harry points to an interesting research paper on Google+ published by Google. The paper analyzes the importance of selectively sharing content with specific "circles" of people.

Bing and Yahoo make up about 30% of advertising spend by companies supported by Trada's marketplace, which crowdsources search engine campaigns to its network of experts. The companies have released a white paper identifying why the Bing-Yahoo alliance generates higher conversion rates and return on investments on many client campaigns as compared to Google.   

Senator Charles Schumer expressed his concerns in a letter to Apple and Google, arguing that hyper-detailed images of people's backyards and other objects could pose a threat to both privacy and national security, according to Jacqui Cheng. Google highlighted plans recently to use a fleet of planes to support aerial photography for its 3D mapping technology. Schumer called it "military-grade spy planes." The letter requests that the two companies notify the communities in advance and automatically blur the photos of individuals, as well as provide an opt-out for property owners so their homes don't appear on the maps.