Last week, Google rolled out automated dayparting?the ability to automatically serve ads toward optimal times of the day. This is good news for search: it's bound to greatly heighten advertisers' precision, and eliminate campaign waste. What's more, Google dayparting will be free. (Until now, automated dayparting was available only through third-party search firms.)

How do you dramatically increase the effectiveness of your search engine marketing without even logging in to AdWords? You do it by developing, testing and refining landing pages and by deep- linking your campaigns.

Google may be the king of search, but in one area at least, Yahoo is kicking Google's can around the block. The upstart Yahoo! Answers has blown by the venerable Google Answers (venerable at least by Internet time, having been around since May 2002), and seems to be drawing rave reviews from analysts and users alike. The service launched in December of 2005 and had its 10 millionth question posted in May. When it comes to share of the online answer market, it has amassed about 10 times the traffic that Google Answers has in the past 6 months, according …

Savvy search marketers know that while you cannot always grow the number of searches for your best performing keywords, it is often possible to hitch your search marketing star to keywords tied to events or personalities that are getting a high volume of searches. Such an opportunity exists right now for those who can capitalize on the mania for World Cup Soccer.

The latest announcements from Google have been released at such a frenetic pace and cover such wide territory that it helps to review all the pieces in one place, deconstruct what the real meaning is for marketers, and understand how they affect the competitive landscape.

In traditional advertising, each segment along the buy-flow works independently from the next. But search is different....

I ask this question all the time after finding just what I was looking for on Google or Yahoo in a matter of seconds. Wouldn't it be nice if you could search your house just as easily? Imagine entering a query for "brown Teva sandals home" or "paprika kitchen cabinet" and getting those same quick results.

What is the No. 1 thing that keeps the sales teams at Yahoo, Google and MSN up at night? It's not click fraud, it's not capping of bid prices, and it's not counting their stock options. This is another "C" word. I call it the C-Level Ceiling.

Search is moving from the desktop to mobile devices. Thanks to the search training we've all received from online veterans like Google, Yahoo, Amazon and eBay, search on mobile devices promises to be an extremely efficient sales and marketing channel....

Cara: You should do a column on how no one makes up their own mind about anything anymore, and how everyone relies on what everyone else says first.... A conversation, partly verbatim and mostly imagined, with Cara, this week's guest Insider.