By: Adam McFarland | Source: site-reference.com

When you think of building a search engine friendly site you probably don’t think of optimizing your images. Title tags and META tags probably come to mind first, but optimizing images can attract more visitors to your site and enhance their experience when they get there. Properly optimized images will decrease page load times, allow people with disabilities that use screen readers to understand the content that they can’t see, and bring new visitors to your site from image searches.

There are several important factors to consider when optimizing images on your site:

File Names

Giving pictures an appropriate filename will help search engines determine its contents, especially for image specific searches like Google’s Image Search. For example, naming a picture of a butterfly “butterfly.jpg” is better than naming it “1234.jpg.”

Image Size and Quality

The fact that both image size and quality are important causes problems for site owners. Lower quality images increase loading speed, but hurt rankings in image searches and detract from the overall user experience. Higher quality images help in image search rankings and look great, but cause pages to load slowly, which can be a problem for visitors with slow connection speeds.

I’ve found that the best way to get the best of both worlds is to have a small, lower quality image on the page that links to a higher quality image file. That way the page can be loaded and viewed quickly, but users wanting a closer look can click the image, and image searches will have a high quality image to index (increasing your chances of ranking high). For example, on an e-commerce site, it makes sense to place small thumbnail images next to the description of an item and then link the thumbnail to a higher quality image of the item for potential buyers looking to get a closer look.

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By: Jon Rognerud  | Source: sitepronews.com

Abstract: The latest frontier in search engine technology is social search. Born out of the social networking boom, social search will attempt to humanize search results thereby providing users with consumer driven answers to their queries. Considering that 50% of queries go unanswered, social search could be the biggest breakthrough since page ranking.

As search giants, Google, Yahoo and MSN continue their fierce battle to become king of the search engines, internet marketers are faced with increasing challenges to dominate in the rankings. As algorithms and methodologies change, savvy entrepreneurs and Madison Avenue continue their heated battle for a coveted Top 10 spot in search engine rankings.

Social search is not officially here but the debut is not far off. Yahoo, MSN and Google are all purportedly working on methodologies to converge search and user generated content all while walking the tightrope known as "privacy." Yahoo has been beta-testing Yahoo Answers since December 2005, Microsoft is in talks with Eurekster.com, a company specializing in social search and Google is experimenting with Google Base Beta.

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By: David A. Utter | Source: webpronews.com

The deal between Microsoft and pay per call advertising provider Ingenio will place ads on the Windows Live Search for Mobile service.

Ingenio has fared well with its partnership with AOL in offering these pay per call ads, and Microsoft wants to follow suit. The two companies announced a partnership today to embed ads from Ingenio’s ad network in mobile searches performed with Windows Live Search.

Big returns have been forecasted for such advertising. Pay per call becomes more important when considering the context of local search along with it, but as it stands now pay per call could be a multi-billion dollar market shortly:

"Our current forecast indicates the market for Pay Per Call advertising is poised to reach $3.7 billion in the next four years, and the rapid growth in mobile search is certain to further Pay Per Call adoption among top-tier advertisers and publishers," said Matt Booth, Program Director, Interactive Local Media, The Kelsey Group.Pay per call and local search go together because millions of people carry cellphones regularly. Although usage of cellphones in the US for data services like search has not taken off as it has in Asia and Europe, where faster connections can be found, the wireless companies are trying to catch up and drive more data service adoption.

When that does take place, Microsoft has to fight a host of competitors, including Google, Yahoo, and AOL among others in establishing itself as a mobile search choice. That can happen if Microsoft can make the kind of deals others have made to be default choices on a particular hardware maker’s phone.

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