Vertical search seems to have been put on the back burner for many search marketers. With new buzz words like "Social Media" and "Local/Mobile Targeting", who could blame them? But let's not be so quick to forget about tried and true relevancy for shinny new promises. While vertical search may not be for every brand or market, if it fits, it can be your very best friend. At the vertical search session here in San Jose,

I am here at the first session of the day, yes i am up on time after the Google Dance! We have Rebecca Lieb, Contributing Editor, ClickZ moderating this morning. The first speaker this morning is Amanda Watlington, Owner, Searching for Profit Amanda starts it off by saying that blogs are now not only used just for your organic search play but has grown to be so much more.

There's a couple of interesting things to note in the July search share ranking released by Nielsen-Online . But first, yes as expected Google once again leads the pack garnering around 4.8 billion searches of the total 8 billion searches conducted for July in the U.S. What so interesting about this figure is the fact that Google has registered a 16% year-to-year growth.

H1 - H6 elements " briefly describe the topic of the section they introduce ". They form a page HTML semantic structure that can " be used by user agents, for example, to construct a table of contents for a document automatically ". Header tags will not dramatically effect the page rankings, of course, but the correct usage of the elements will " reinforce " other on-page factors and structure the contents of a document.

Last week Rand posted a brilliant linkbuilding tip that involved taking SEO advantage of mistyped/ misspelled domains. Putting aside black / white hat discussion, I am giving the list of domain typo generators for your advantage: 1. DomainTools Domain Typo Generator offers a variety of options: " TLD view " shows the list of domain typos and a top level domain map with registration status )available, available )previously registered(, registered )active website(,

Google Webmaster Central has added a new feature that aims to make website visitors'  encounter with the perennial problem and most dreaded 404 "Not found" page a more pleasant if not useful experience. Although there has been manual work-around to solve this problem, mostly by editing the 404 php pages and customizing it to direct users to other parts of a site, it has been a tedious process, until now.

Latest report from the American Customer Satisfaction Index published by the University of Michigan shows Google topping the list of search and portal companies customer satisfaction survey. Based on interviews conducted on 3,000 customers, Google got 87% customer satisfaction rating for 2008. This score registered a 10.3% change from last year. Interestingly, Yahoo which occupied the top spot in 2007's survey now trails Google at the number 2 spot.Microsoft, Ask.com,

Finally six months after its launch, Yahoo! Buzz is now open to the public. The announcement follows several months of beta testing the service to selected sites, including the SE Journal. Yahoo claims that Buzz now has around 5 million users and sites which were selected to implement the content voting system has indicated increase in traffic since they embed the Buzz button on their site.

We are sitting in on the Everything But Google: Alternative Search Marketing Options panel. Andrew Goodman is moderating the panel this afternoon. Were going to start off the panel with Sage Lewis, Search Engine Watch Expert & President of Sagerocks.com. Sage talks about how there is more media to buy now than ever before, but there is not more money to spend and that there is a larger risk envolved if you don't know what you are doing.

I am here at the Pay Per Conversion panel at Search Engine Strategies. Bret Crosby at Google is discussing the conversion process and the many mistakes web site owners make. From a marketing perspective we want to provide the products and/or services which our customers want. The search engine are no different, they want to provide the most relevant search results to the searcher.

One of the first panels here at SES San Jose is the Search Industry Update. This panel tends to dive into the over all health of the industry and specifically where the major search engines are today. Not one of the funnest sessions of the week as it tends to be a bit dry unless you are a real search engine statistics geek. This morning we had a number of presenters each with a different perspective on the big picture of the search industry.

In my overviews of multiple seo tools , I repeatedly looked into tools that check or track keyword rankings . Hamlet Batista recently wrote a brilliant post encouraging us not to rely on ranking metric too much. One of the points discussed in Hamlet's post is that keyword position should not be the ultimate goal of SEO campaign and hence it shouldn't be an SEO process success metric.

The long tail session is hitting all of the blended areas of serach, which is in itself Long Tail. Aaron Shear is speaking now about Shopping Search and hitting the longtail search terms in a shopping search engine campaign. Aaron feels that the main "head" search terms, or the money terms, result in a lot of traffic bouncing off the site : meaning they can drive a lot of semi-targeted traffic but not the best in conversions, dependent upon the terms.

Hey everyone, im here at Search Engine Strategies San Jose, sitting here in the universal and blended search panel. Mr Tawadros talks about how universal search is only a year and a half old and is still a baby. Johanna Wright is the first one to speak on the panel and she will be discussing what universals earch is all about.  Universal search gives the ability to showcase more than just ten links. Google at this time had many of diffrent products such as image search,

Long tail search goes far beyond normal organic SEO and deep into local search. Mary Bowling is speaking at SES San Jose about the long tail of local search. All relevant search to brick and mortar businesses is local search. 30% to 40% of searches have local intent and search engines have to interperate this intent. What is the long term of local search? Even if your main search terms is "denver plumber",

We've seen and heard Google advocates for the freeing up of the white spectrum. And today it has officially launched its campaign to unite the public in lobbying for the opening up of this unused airwaves between broadcast TV channels to according to Google to provide affordable, high-speed wireless Internet connectivity nationwide. Google is calling for uncharged use of this spectrum not only for their benefit for the whole public as well.

I continue collecting information for my upcoming mega-post on FireFox SEO extensions. Today I am listing add-ons that help to perform link analysis in Yahoo and Yahoo SiteExplorer: FireFox Extension Most useful feature Yahoo search plugins Quickly access Yahoo! and Yahoo! SiteExplorer. yExplore Quickly access link data by right-click on any URL. SearchStatus Quickly access link data of the currently active page. SEOquake / SEO for Firefox See SEO information for each Yahoo!

The list of companies suing up Google just got a new member in GraphOn Corp., a  developer of server-based application publishing and web-enabling software solutions. GraphOn has charged Google with infringement of four its owned patents. Filing their complaint in US District Court in the Eastern District of Texas, GraphOn complains that Google has infringed on their U.S. Patent Nos.  6,324,538 )the '538 patent(, 6,850,940 )the '940 patent(, 7,028,

Sometimes it seems that you cannot go a day without reading a story about the economic challenges faced by our country. On one day the headline news is the declining housing market, the next it is a debate about if we are or are not in a recession, and the next it is about the latest financial company that needs to be bailed out. But what does that mean if you are a search marketer?

If you haven't heard, we are having a party on Monday the 18th to benefit two very worthy charities.  We are going to split the proceeds from the event 50/50 between the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and The Children's Hospital .  I'd like to tell you a bit about why we are supporting the Children's Hospital. I'm hopi ng this post will make you want to support the Children's Hospital, too. I am the proud father of three beautiful little children,