Rand Fishkin analyzes the relationship between user experience and search engine optimization. He attempts to dispel the negative myths about how the two interact in hopes of helping marketers improve on the look and the search results of Web sites. Starting with page layout requesting visitors to register or fill out a form, Fishkin tells us to break up the process into bite-size pieces. Research shows site visitors typically complete multi-step processes on multiple pages, rather than when they must complete a long form on one page. Read the article here.  

I'm beginning to wonder whether Google's idea to integrate social signals into search query rankings will backfire. Search term analysis has always allowed brands to better understand the topics with greatest interest to site visitors. But as Google began to encrypt more information, making it inaccessible to marketers, did the decision push sites like Facebook to the forefront, bringing clarity to content? Greg Levitt explains it here in terms of visitors to publisher sites.

Kevin Lee tells us that when bidding for tablet clicks combined with desktop and laptop clicks in Google Enhanced Campaigns, many advertisers will see inflationary trends in billed cost per clicks. But that's just one of five reasons that marketers might pay more. He tells us other reasons and explains how to avoid the pitfalls. Read the article here.

Reset daily budgets, establish goals, update to-do lists, test, experiment, and research to find the ad group that is performing best. These are some of the tips Kayla Kurtz serves up to help marketers get through the first month of a new campaign. She takes us through each step and provides details, explaining that just because Google launched Enhanced Campaigns doesn't mean that search marketers should forget about the basics. They still apply. Read the article here.

Bing Maps got a bunch of new images recently -- about 13,799,276 square kilometers of high-resolution satellite shots and a better view of the ocean floor. The images include a river running through the Brazilian Highlands, a metropolitan area, dunes, and an active stratovolcano on the Pacific Ring of Fire. With cloud coverage reduced, the service now covers the U.S. and most of Western Europe. It is intended to enhance the Windows 8 Maps app.  

Content marketing strategies are important to becoming more efficient and relevant to Web site visitors. Brian Jensen gives us information on 10 free tools to improve content marketing efforts, from tools that will analyze the top 10 results in Google queries to those that allow marketers to refine searches bsaed on categories like videos and save keywords from the results to quickly copy, paste and analyze. Read the story here.