How does the usability and accessibility of your website affect your SEO efforts? In today's au Natural column, " Usability and SEO ," Mark Jackson explains the connection and gives you tips to make your site user-friendly.

Is that incoming link a Manolo, a Jimmy Choo, or a bargain pump from Payless? In today's small business SEM column, " Why Links are Like Shoes ," Carrie Bradshaw, I mean, Carrie Hill indulges the fashionistas among us with a catwalk of links - and how to make them part of your wardrobe.

Seems Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang has made an end move to stop the bickering between the usurpers and his current slate of board members. They have offered Carl Icahn a spot on the new board along with another of his proposed new slate of candidates, according to the Wall Street Journal. Very clever Jerry. Adding Icahn and former AOL Chairman and CEO Jonathan Miller is a good way to stop the schoolyard emails and press releases we have seen over the past month or so.

When it comes to paid search, there's no such thing as a free lunch. In today's Profitable PPC column, " PPC Keyword Sets: Words to the Wise ," David Szetela explains why a successful paid search campaign requires a constant gardner.

Whether you stood in line for hours for an iPhone 3G or are still hanging with your first gen iPhone )that's me(, you are likely to use your touch-screen gadget to conduct searches. Google has not only created a downloadable application for its search product , but has also increased the speed of its web-based mobile search application. Users should now find search to be twice as fast as it used to be - and that's not just for 3G, but EDGE as well.

Just over a month after releasing Adwords Editor 6.0 , the team at Google AdWords has released a new update. The update launches a highly requested feature: the ability to download performance statistics. If you have AdWords Editor, you should be prompted automatically to download the new update, Version 6.0.1. The update will not affect comments or unposted changes. Because of this, Google says : You don't need to export an archive of your account. In the auto-update prompt,

As gas prices rise, mall traffic has been dropping. But all is not lost for retailers. Consumers are increasingly turning online to conduct their shopping, according a report in the New York Times . J.C. Penney saw 8.7% growth in online traffic for the first quarter of 2008, while same store sales saw a 7.4% drop. Gap saw a 21% increase in online sales compared with an 11% decline in same store sales. Looking for a way to get shoppers to buy from your site?

Last Thursday, I had a chance to spend a full day with a diverse group of search engine marketers during the Search Engine Strategies "Optimizing for Universal Search" workshop in Seattle. Over lunch, we talked about SES San Jose â€" which is coming up August 18-22, 2008. The people around the table were excited to see that conference speakers from brand name companies like Adobe, Cisco, Discover, Forbes, HP, Humana, IBM, Intuit, P&G, Monster, Napster,

comScore and Nielsen have released their search market data for June 2008. comScore gives insight into month-over-month growth while Nielsen's report shows year-over-year growth. Let's look at comScore's data first. Google dropped by .3% from May 2008 to reach 61.5% of the search market for June. Yahoo gained that .3% to rise to 20.9% for June. Microsoft gained .7% to 9.2%, while Ask.com and AOL dropped .2% and .4% respectively.

Jerry Yang threw Carl Icahn a bone today. So Carl Icahn called the dogs off. Yahoo! Inc. )YHOO(,announced today that it has agreed to settle with Carl Icahn to avoid a proxy contest related to the Company's 2008 annual meeting of stockholders. * Jerry Yang will remain CEO. * Carl Icahn will join the board. * Eight Board members will face re-election. Under the terms of the settlement agreement, eight members of Yahoo!

Yahoo has announced that it has forged an agreement with Carl Icahn. Here's the details. Yahoo's board will expand to 11 members, but only 8 of the current board will stay on. They are: Roy Bostock Ronald Burkle Eric Hippeau Vyomesh Joshi Arthur Kern Mary Agnes Wilderotter Gary Wilson Jerry Yang Robert Kotick is the remaining board member. He's decided to step down. The expansion will occur AFTER the August 1 shareholders meeting. Carl Icahn will become a board member,

On Friday, comScore announced that Google retained its lead in the U.S. core search market capturing 61.5 percent of the searches conducted in June 2008. By and large, the press coverage focused on the fact that Google's share of core searches was down slightly from May, while Yahoo! and Microsoft's share of core searches were up slightly from the previous month. But, farther down the comScore press release was data on the "expanded search queries" for June.

Well-lnown New York Search Marketer Avi Wilensky went to an interesting office launch that looks at the search space on the web, in terms of "a few large multibillion dollar players dominating the space. It's an exclusive "billionaires club", with a single player that has more market share than its 3 main competitors combined )Google at almost 60% according to latest Comscore data(" Wilensky noted.

Matt Cutts has now earned international film star status. Google Webmaster Central in Germany has created an SEO video with excellent production values - particularly by YouTube standards. They've even translated Matt into German : Hallo an alle User aus Deutschland! Ob ihr nun User, Webmaster oder ein SEO seid - ich freue mich, hier die Gelegenheit zu haben, ein bisschen mit euch zu sprechen. Ich hoffe, dass ich bald die Möglichkeit finde,

In April, before Microsoft's ultimatum for Yahoo to accept its bid came to pass, Legg Mason threw its support behind Yahoo . Now the investor group is continuing its support of Yahoo and plans to vote for the current board at the upcoming August 1 shareholders meeting . However, Legg Mason did advise Yahoo and Carl Icahn to bury the hatchet by the time of the meeting.

To pass the gclid or not to pass the gclid, that is the question. At least, if you're trying to tag your AdWords URLs in Google Analtyics it is. On the Google Analytics blog , they're talking about using auto-tagging in Adwords in order to facilitate easy viewing of info in Analytics. But problems may arise if you've got some URL redirecting going on. Basically, auto-tagging inserts a little snippet of code into destination URLs. But if you have several redirects,

Google is looking to extend its global ad reach with its purchase of a Russian ad agency. Rambler Media has sold Begun advertising agency to Google for $140 million. Begun serves up contextual ads. Rambler will also contract search technology from Google as part of the deal. "Google is very committed to giving Russian users, advertisers and partners the best possible service and experience," said Mohammad Gawdat, Managing Director Emerging Markets, Google.

Google wasn't the only one reporting second quarter revenues yesterday. Microsoft also dished, though they label the same period as their fiscal fourth quarter. The software giant made $15.84 billion last quarter, up 18% over the same quarter last year. Annual revenue was $60.42 billion, which was also up 18% over the year prior. The growth rate is not good enough for Wall Street, however, as the stock was down nearly 5% at the time of this post.

Google revenues topped $5.37 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2008, an increase of 39 percent compared to the second quarter of 2007. That's also an increase of 3 percent compared to the first quarter of 2008. But those numbers still disappointed investors who basked in the glow of Google's growth and perhaps lingered a little too long in the sun. The big news? Weakness in key sectors such as real estate,

Seems GoDaddy is having some problems with their just launched .me domains. People were applying left and right for them and obviously GoDaddy seemed to have a "box office" hit with the new domain extension. But as SEW moderator Discovery details here , everyone seems to get an initial you got your domain only to find out a little while later that the names have already been assigned to someone else.