Remember the little "Made in the U.S.A." sticker or tag on products and clothing? It's back. It once stood for quality. It can again. Could it fit into a company's local search strategy? In the past 9 months, the total number of visitors to search navigation sites conducted via mobile devices has jumped more than 25%, with nearly 86 million people now seeking local business information on their mobile phones in the United States alone.

Marketers in North America spent nearly $16.6 billion on search engine marketing in 2012, with several milestones influencing media and advertising in 2013, according to GroupM. The agency expects that number to rise to nearly $18.6 billion this year.

Scott Kupor, managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz, explains how "we" are holding back the middle class in America, and points to the U.S. government's mistake to "systematically cut the middle class out of the most important wealth creation opportunity for the next 50 years."

Speed and convenience are the main drivers of a mobile search, but putting a price on each function places it all into perspective. Can you put a price on every time someone clicks on a locator button on your Web site or looks up a pair of jeans or t-shirt? What's the return on investment for changing the click button from red to green -- and how many clicks does it take before that online customer walks into the store to make a purchase?

Baseball spring training typically takes place in March, with the season running between early April and late September. I have yet to see sports organizations, sporting goods stores, or local events take advantage of lower-priced keyword or optimized terms related to the sport to drive local in-store sales. Maybe Google and Bing need to rewrite the rules when it comes to paid-search ads related to information vs purchase intent.

Open rates have always been a problem for marketers trying to get recipients to click the button. Timing and frequency matter. Ask Joe Mediate from Kookoo Bear. He'll tell you emails sent on Thursday or Friday perform better than Monday or the weekend. Thursday emails have an average 11.5% open rate; Fridays, 12.1%; and Mondays, 5%. Experian Marketing Services provides tips on how to get similar results.

Tying together multiple profiles and networks to serve up information about a person, a place or a thing creates challenges for search engines. It's like stringing or graphing together an underlying net below the surface of the Web to connect all things throughout the world. It's based on the relationship between entities or links.

Marin Software CEO Chris Lien will take the company public on the New York Stock Exchange Friday by ringing the opening bell. The San Francisco-based company will become the latest search and social marketing advertising management and technology firm to go through an initial public offering.

Say good-bye to overnight search visibility and unnatural links. A study of 500,000 links shows that Google has been steadily reducing its tolerance for Web spam and now penalizes sites with as little as 50% suspicious links in their profiles, according to a report released Tuesday.

Pick up a mobile device. Open the Google voice app. Speak your query: "bloomingdale's south coast plaza." It took 6 seconds from the time I opened the app to when Google returned results -- both audio and text. You get similar results when typing the keywords into the URL on the Chrome browser, but unless you have an app that provides a click-to-call feature you'll need to type that number into the keypad on your phone.