Optimizing your blog for search will certainly increase the amount of search engine referrals that will come through, which sounds great on the surface to anyone looking to monetize that traffic. When it comes to retaining users and garnering popularity, however, search becomes less important.

Inbound traffic is the most commonly employed metric in determining the value of a website property. In calculating market share, analytics firms almost exclusively base their figures on the volume of traffic a site receives.

Counting the online audience through the use of cookies may be overstating the size of the audience for websites, due to Internet users deleting cookies from their machines.

I am overly tired of the “X is dead” redundancy. I understand the enthusiasm with which those who spout “X is dead” embrace what they believe in, but communication channels rarely die because of the advent of something new, even when that new thing represents a revolutionary, paradigm-changing development. Print didn’t replace face-to-face communication, after all, and television didn’t kill radio.

I’ve written before about multivariate testing, an emerging technique for rigorous analysis of just what persuades customers to convert. But some companies have been stopped in the past by the cost of licensing a multivariate testing tool. Yesterday, Google Website Optimizer, a multivariate testing tool, emerged from a restricted beta test and can be used by any Google AdWords advertiser for free.

Harris Interactive has released a report documenting its findings from a recent study evaluating the prevalence of video game addiction among youth. There is skepticism, however, surrounding how Harris defined the term “addiction” when conducting the survey.

It looks like Harris Interactive has finally managed to accomplish a feat that has baffled physical and mental health professionals for decades; they have defined addiction.

When reviewing search marketing blogs each week for inclusion in our big list, one of the most consistent problems we see is that blog owners don’t make it easy to subscribe. Either there is no icon for the RSS feed or it’s hidden way below the fold.  

The attention span of Internet users has been the subject of many studies, most coming to the conclusion that, on average, people only spend a few seconds on any given site. An eye tracking study from Poynter Online, however, reveals that users who go online searching for news actually spend longer amounts of time in consuming content than their offline counterparts.

In January, Todd And published the Power 150 Top Marketing Blogs, a ranked listing of marketing blogs in the US.

White papers bring great value to those seeking them, according to a major study of more than 4,000 business-to-business marketing and business professionals.

This is especially true in the technology world, where white papers are one of the leading sources of lead generation.

YouTube’s explosion onto the Internet scene was no accident. It was timing – timing so fortuitous that you might compare it to an alignment of the planets. YouTube didn’t rise in a vacuum, but it rose in the House of MySpace, to continue the astrology analogy, with a number of other forces in play.

ShopFactory.com (by Steffan Klein & Michael Veith, according to the About page) is a system to help you create online shops.

Microsoft researchers teamed up with University of California, Davis researchers to pinpoint exactly where "the bottleneck" of Web spam occurs and how legitimate advertisers inadvertently end up in bad neighborhoods. The majority of spam, they found out, comes from the same few places, and the middlemen are some names you might recognize.

The Online Publishers Association has released a study," Going Mobile: An International Study of Content Use and Advertising on the Mobile Web" finds that the mobile platform is becoming an effective source for content and marketing because of strong growth and consumers paying more attention to advertising.

The study found that 76 percent of all consumers in the US and Western Europe have access to the Web on their mobile device, and one third (32%) use it. When it comes to usage the UK leads with 54 percent followed by the US and Italy both coming in at 41 percent.

I came across an interesting study conducted by UMass Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research today. 

You have four seconds to get your site loaded and about one-twentieth of a second to impress the visitor before she flits on like an attention-deficient hummingbird. But before that, you have about one second, in the search results, to get her attention in the first place. And just like the tentative beginnings of most romances, it’s all about what you say, how you look, and where you live.

Fairly regularly in the blogosphere you hear people complaining about how few people reading their blog go the next step and leave a comment.

I recall that last year, Darren Rowse posted his "10 Techniques to Get More Comments on Your Blog", linking to a Jakob Nielsen study that found that

Kay Schnewerk’s 4iMedia.com is a German PR agency with clients from all walks of life, including (according to 4iMedia) the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

At Powerset, they call it ‘natural language search’. We call it a $12 million homage to the days of the butler at Ask Jeeves, when that search engine proved more useful for entertainment value than actual quality search results.

University of Louisville graduate student, Li Ge, has been awarded a $149,923 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to engage in research regarding data mining and click-fraud detection.