SMX West is running strong on its first day. This morning, Paul Yiu from Bing and Mike Cassidy from Google spoke about social signals and how they are factored into ranking algorithms and search results. What are social signals? Both Bing and Google use social signals to produce personalized search results that youll care more about. For example, if a friend of yours likes a site on Facebook,

Beginning this spring, advertisers will be able to leverage a new adCenter Quality Score for optimizing campaigns in the Bing+Yahoo search marketplace. Included here are some of the preliminary details regarding how this feature will work, and how you.

Explicit structure sounds more exciting than it is, but this concept is one of the most important considerations when designing content for your web site. To quickly summarize, your customer relies on headings and links to navigate your web site. This may seem like a standard part of any web page, but this structure is a scent trail that leads your customer their intended goal. Why use headings and links? Well,

March is just chock full of events for small business and search professionals! Coming up we have SMX West in San Jose , SES New York and on March 8th, SMB thought leaders, journalists and entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes will descend on Digital Sandbox in New York for the 6th Annual Small Business Summit. Check out the Small Business Summit site for specific details,

Imagine living in Iceland. First your economy gets badly damaged by the global recession, than a volcano named Eyjafjallajoekull erupts. For weeks not a flight can enter or depart your country. If you happen to depend on the tourist industry, this isnt.

Social Media has now become a major piece of the search marketing puzzle.  You can already see how important it has become with the number of sessions offered at SES London this year about this topic. Lisa Myers , CEO, Verve Search , in her session.

This year Im attending my first Search Conference at SES London. It seems the best place to be if you want to network with European search marketing professionals, learn about search and hear great speakers. Yesterday, I attended.

This morning I went to a brilliant SES session by Guy Levine )@guylevine from www.returnondigital.com (. Aiming to 'make PPC as sexy as possible', he covered all the basics of paid search, plus a few added extras, and generally left the audience with a comprehensive starter pack for creating an effective account on Bing, Yahoo!, Google and Facebook. Here are his top insights and tips. 1. The main differentiators between the competitors are: Google has the biggest market share.

I think Jerry Maguire may be one of my favorite movies, top 10 at least. Iconic one-liners aside )I can think of 3 off the top of my head(, the idea of a freelance agent in a highly competitive industry seeing success after taking a leap of faith is definitely a story thats worth telling dont you think? Do you have a story worth telling? Here at Microsoft Advertising, we judge how well were doing by whether youre accomplishing your advertising goals.

We are at SES London! Weve turned up at a great location at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, right in the heart of the city. Westminster Abbey and the Big Ben are beautiful backdrops to this great annual search event. Over the next few days we will keep you up to date with blog posts, tweets and a photo feed from our Flickr account. If you are interested in an introduction to Search Engine Marketing )SEM(,

Were in the home stretch of preparations for this years SMX West in San Jose, CA during March 8-10th. As always, well be there with session coverage both via Twitter and here on the adCenter Blog. If youre still making decisions on which sessions you plan to attend, heres a quick look at the schedule of Microsoft speakers we have lined up: You can see the full agenda and the list of speakers and their titles at the SMX West site .

Shakespeare once wrote: If music be the food of love, play on. I think what he was trying to say is that if insurance is in season, then its time to fill your boots! Now is certainly the time to be devoting your full attention to.

Its Social Media Week ! From New York to Istanbul and Hong Kong to sunny London people are talking about social media. Very much in the global spirit of the event, this morning three experienced social media experts spoke at the Design Council about how social media can help you build an international brand. Ash Choudhury, UK Head of Digital Marketing, Nokia UK , Wendy Tan White, Founder of Moonfruit and our own Mel Carson,

Last week I met with a friend and her business partner to walk them through the basics of setting up their first PPC advertising campaign on adCenter. After the meeting, I followed up with them in an email that contained links to adCenter Help and our adExcellence tutorials , but I couldnt help wondering if my own explanations had been effective, or if the curse of knowledge rendered them nebulous and vague. Today,

3 rd April 2011 may not mean much more to you than being that special day when Coleen Rooney celebrates her 25 th birthday... However, if you were to forget the significance of this date, it might just be another year of guiltily handing over those forecourt-bought flowers. Thats right,

While we add quite a bit of information to our Facebook page and Twitter streams, @adCenter and @MSAdvertising , theres another way you can stay up-to-date with free monthly newsletters, account optimization advice and special offers that the rock stars who make up our Communications team put together every month. If you havent updated your contact information in Microsoft Advertising adCenter lately, theres no time like the present!

I hate Valentines Day. This is not because I am single. It isnt. Really. It also isnt because I am bitter, surly and ill-tempered, although it helps. I may have an extreme aversion to Valentines Day akin to Liverpool hating Man U, but as a search marketer, I cannot afford to ignore it and neither can you. Along with the usual flowers, lingerie and jewellery, shoppers are looking at general gift, travel, entertainment and restaurant terms.

In 2009, the announcement of the Search Alliance betweem Microsoft and Yahoo! brought excitement to the paid search market. By combining the power of Yahoo! and Bing in search advertising, brands could ultimately benefit greater from a more efficient marketplace. While the Search Alliance roll out is still underway globally, North American users were transitioned in October 2010. Now, almost three months later,

What do Harry Shrum )Bing(, Matt Cutts )Google( and Rich Skrenta )Blekko( all have in common? They'll all be engaged in what's sure to be a lively roundtable discussion during the Farsight 2011: Beyond the Search Box gathering )and webcast!( in.

Starting this week, everywhere you look there will be red roses, heart shaped candies, and bright pink greeting cards telling you Valentines Day is upon us. Whether you consider V-day the most romantic day of the year or just a "Hallmark Holiday" generated day to spend money, the fact is Valentines Day is the 4 th largest retail holiday of the year. With more than $14 billion+ in spending anticipated,