Marketers know the importance of local search optimization, but not all know how to make sure their business serves up in the top results in the limited space on a mobile phone screen. So business owners might hire an optimization expert. Aubrey Beck provides several basic questions to ask potential local search engine optimization experts that can provide deeper insights into the person's qualifications. Read the article here.

China's Qihoo 360 continues to ramp up its search services with the help of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group to compete with Baidu, according to Michael Kan. Launched in August, the engine has been slowly taking market share from Baidu, he tells us. The latest service was built on Alibaba's shopping search engine called eTao.

Content is often overlooked when organizations build a business case for marketing automation, according to Brad Miller. He describes three strategies that he believes create high levels of synchronicity between marketing automation, search and the top of the marketing funnel. Insights and analytics, along with conversion and dynamic pages, are the other two tactics. Read the article here.

Through a firsthand example, Tim Resnik guides us through how to use the Google referral string to interpret where in Universal Search the site's traffic originated. He explains that this tactic works well for calculating return on investments and optimization branded search Google Sitelinks strategies and thumbnails, as well as analyzing semantic markups. Read the article here.

The Xbox has sparked 266,000 comments compared to the Galaxy S4’s 117,000 and the Facebook phone's 83,000, according to Synthesio, a global and social media monitoring company. It's one of the most talked-about new releases. Proof of concepts and videos from major research divisions of companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo fascinate me. Here's one from Microsoft dubbed IllumiRoom, a proof-of-concept system that augments the area surrounding a television with projected visuals to enhance traditional gaming experiences. It demonstrates the ability to search by voice commands. View the video here.

Anna Lewis shows marketers how the Google Analytics Language report can help them understand how their campaigns cross language barriers. She serves up a report showing the number of visits and on-page interaction for a variety of languages. In the post, Lewis also walks through advanced segmentation for language groupings, language report data, and more. Read the article here.

The way consumers consume technology continues to change, and marketers need to stay aware. Alex Brokaw reminds us that mobile phones have been in the market for more than a decade -- long enough for consumers to look for the next best thing. An infographic outlines the coming trends providing a picture of what wearable devices might look like. While marketers may never find anyone decked out like this, the infographic gives a sense of where wearable tech is headed. Read the article here.

Authorship has the potential to change the way marketers and consumers view content and its authors. Optimization provides support. Adam Audette serves insights into innovations with rel="author" and rel="publisher," including ideas on how ecommerce companies can begin using it. View the video here.

DocuSign wanted to use third-party validation from customers to capture thought leadership and brand awareness, and build an online community around a target audience. Rather than use a standard email campaign, the company tapped LinkedIn to send a series of sponsored InMails from its webinar speakers. Read the article here.

Google warns against not serving up the same ad twice in a short period of time, so Ally Justin Sous ties that into why ignoring this advice could cause paid-search ad strategies to go sour. Sous tells us that one problem could become "double serving, and national brands finding loop holes in Google's Terms of Service." Loopholes are allowing marketers to "double serve," which means marketers find the loophole that allows them to serve the same ad more than once for the same search result.