Day 1 of Connected Marketing Week in San Francisco starts with BlogWorkz including a session called: Inspiring an Army of Bloggers. Here users will learn What it takes to inspire an army of corporate bloggers under the banner of one brand. And how businesses are reaching out to customers and enthusiasts as blogging brand ambassadors. I had a chance to catch up with one of the panelists, Lee Sherman Editor-in-Chief, Personal Finance Group (Intuit) to get his insight on the session…

As the worlds of web design and SEO merge ever closer, we’ve been seeing design-specific elements produce a positive impact on SEO for the sites that employ them. It’s terrific news for SEOs who love design and are capable of and passionate about making it part of their repertoire. It’s also great for designers who find that as they evolved from Flash designs to machine-readable CSS and separated markup from content, they’ve earned more links and more organic search love…

In order to help you stay up to date with changes to our AdWords policies, we’ve launched the AdWords Policy Change Log. This new site makes it easier to stay informed about upcoming AdWords policy changes by posting a short summary, including the affected region, for each policy change going into effect.While the AdWords Policy Change log will have the most comprehensive listing of changes to AdWords policies, if we anticipate that your account will be directly affected by an upcoming policy change, we’ll still email you a service announcement, as necessary, to make sure you’re aware of the change…

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Facebook Questions Opens To Limited Public Release

  Long expected, Facebook’s new Facebook Questions service is now being offered. It allows Facebook users to specifically ask question to and get answers from others in Facebook’s now 500 million strong community…

(Cross-posted from the Lat Long Blog)What do Alex Trebek, teachers and Googlers have in common? Last week, these individuals and groups all came together at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA to celebrate exploration and learning.Google hosted its first Geo Teachers Institute, an intensive two-day workshop in which 150 educators received hands-on training and experience with Google Maps, Google SketchUp and Google Earth, including features like Mars, Moon and SkyMaps…

Note: Normally I write solutions to problems, but this a problem I have no solution for. By explaining it I believe it will still be educational and therefore worth publishing.

The project I’m working on at the moment is in Groovy. In order to set JSON on page load, you have to escape either single quotes or double quotes.

var myJSON = ‘this is the cat\’s first day in Marc\’s house’; // JavaScript string

With groovy, you can cast something as JSON and set it to the view pretty easily…

This is part of our summer series of new Search Stories. Look for the label Search Stories and subscribe to the series. -Ed.Having been a new dad for six months now, I’ve quickly come to learn two valuable parenting lessons. First, being a father is truly a full-time job—and second, sleep is completely overrated. Whether buying the latest bottles, binkies, blankets and bibs, or just blogging about the whole magical journey, becoming a father has been the most invigorating and moving experience of my lifetime…

Over the last two years, the AdSense team has offered the powerful Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) product as an improvement over the original AdSense for search. After some recent improvements, we’re now ready to retire the older version of AdSense for search. If the Google logo on your search results page reads “Powered by Google” instead of the newer “Google Custom Search” then you haven’t yet upgraded to the newer version…

If you invested in bid management software within the past few years, chances are high that you were probably duped in one key area: automation.

Now, before you think I’m about to split hairs here…let’s walk through a few basics to make sure we’re on the same page…and…wait…who am I kidding? This might make you mad – or it will make ppc software companies mad so I suppose it really might split a few hairs…

As many of you know, we started the Go Mobile! series of posts on the Inside AdWords blog to give you an easy way to keep up with the world of mobile advertising.
The mobile industry has really evolved since the start of the series: mobile is becoming a core part of many marketing campaigns and publishers are developing mobile-specific content across the web and in applications across mobile operating systems…

Let’s start with some notes and free-association thoughts on the text of Ontolo’s link building book:

A – The first chapter got off to a good start with some clever ideas.

1) See how link building can support various departments. Makes me think of the interaction between links and sales (e.g. rank the lead gen whitepaper page) or links and PR (linkbait, publicity stunts, contests…)…

Could it really be possible that some freelance writers would lie to you, saying whatever it takes to snag your business, justify their exorbitant fees, and turn you into a submissive client who does whatever they tell you?

Well… yeah.

It’s sad, but in the years I’ve been in the business, I’ve seen companies burned, stung, robbed, and strung out by unethical copywriters who couldn’t care less about them…

This post features some beautiful photos of bridges. A creative photographer has the ability to bring life into a lifeless object with his experience and expertise. Have you seen some of these bridges already? What other beautiful architectural masterpieces can you think of? Let us know what you think in the comments to this post!

Beautiful Photos Of Bridges

Silicon City – San Francisco

The mouth of ny harbor

Golden Gate HDR

Runcorn Bridge at Twilight (11,000+ views)

Bridge at Multnomah Falls…

I thought for completeness I would throw out some quick notes on the creative commons and how it relates to both GPL and proprietary WordPress theme licenses.

I am not a lawyer, this isn’t legal advice, and I am trying to make this “non-specific” to any particular theme because it affects users of themes, not just the theme authors.

The Difference Between GPL & Creative Commons

The primary difference between the GPL & the least restrictive Creative Commons licenses (such as SA – share alike) is that the GPL is aimed at programmers, and the Creative Commons is intended for various forms of art…

I have a free FITC San Francisco to give away. To get it: you just need to enter a comment in this post before August 6, 2010 and the winner will be selected randomly. The event will take place in San Francisco between Aug 17th to 19th. If you are getting the tickets, use coupon code "wdwluv" to get 10% discount. For more information, visit the FITC website.

…

This is the fourth in a series of posts based on the material covered in our latest webinar: Taking Your Site Performance to The Next Level With Optimization Testing.

The ultimate goal of a Web optimization project is to improve revenue and profits driven through your site. Success is measured by tracking changes in KPIs (key performance indicators), most commonly AOV (average order value), conversion rate, days to purchase, bounce rate, cart and checkout abandonment…

At some point, most of us have to make a presentation.

Does the notion fill you with dread? Or perhaps you comfortable with presenting, but often don’t know what to say, or how best to say it? Do you think you might get more sales, or get your way more often, if you could made better presentations?

Making better presentations is a craft that can be learned. Let’s break the elements of a presentation down to an easy-to-use template…

We have a lot of changes going on at SEOmoz (feel free to get excited, we sure are!) and with all of these changes to the site comes the need to focus on tracking. Internally we have spent the last few months redirecting our attention to not only the best practices regarding analytics and data mining, but really pushing ourselves to revisit our analytical processes…

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Report: Bing Generates More Clicks Than Google

  Chitika, a veritable fountain of data lately, has generated some new interesting findings from activity on its search-based advertising network. The company compared ad click behavior on Google and Bing and found that Bing generated about 50% more clicks:
  Across the sample of nearly 15 million impressions used for this study, Google users clicked on […

aimClear’s demographic research product includes social media influencers from a number of channels ranking from Facebook and YouTube to forums.  We then challenge Community Managers to take these “friend leads” and convert them to organic friends over 3-5 days, at a “cost per friend lead” calculated from how much time the friend-conversion takes.  This post samples techniques to identify and qualify friend-leads, influencers and several holistic tactics proven to convert those leads to friends…

If you know anything at all about me, it’s likely that it’s this- I’m ALL about the relationships that I create. I’ll never blatantly walk up to someone and tell them they should be buying a product or service. It’s just not my style. Granted I’ll shamelessly self-promote something, but that’s typically just for the sake of shits and giggles.

For me, it’s never been and never will be about trying to win a client for the sake of numbers…

Humans have always been fascinated by the night sky. And Googlers are no exception. Over the years, Google engineers have used their 20 percent time to create Google Sky, Moon, Mars and most recently Google Sky Map for Android. This handy app, built by engineers in our Pittsburgh office, turns your Android-powered phone into a live map of the night sky. You just point your phone to the sky and it gives you information about the stars and planets that you’re looking at…

In order to provide the best online marketing experience, we want to make sure that you understand how each dollar you invest in AdWords is performing.Today, we’re announcing some upcoming changes to the way our third party partners provide reports and information about AdWords to their clients. If you work with another company to manage your AdWords campaigns, you should be able to find out how much of your advertising budget (cost) was spent on AdWords, how many times your ads appeared (impressions) and how many times users clicked on your ads (clicks)…

This post showcases the beauty of digital painting portraits. As an art lover, I always admire and enjoy painting portraits as they require more skills and time. Capturing male beauty and emotions in a portrait is a very difficult task that requires talent and skills. For this session, we have compiled a list of 30 stunning and beautiful examples of male digital portraits in which you can see the male beauty in the form of photo realism or in other abstract forms…

While UGC and Reviews can often be a mixed blessing, as long as Google continues to reward rich snippets with enhanced visual listings, it’s probably a good idea to try to make reviews part of your website strategy.For those of you who haven’t seen rich snippets and reviews in action, here’s a sample of what they currently look like

To qualify for this program you have to have reviews, format your data using microformats, and submit your website for inclusion in the rich snippet program…

Hey there boys and girls – want to get into multiple niches really fast? Are those niches just slightly different from one another, being a “base keyword” + modifier combination? Know that if you just duplicate the copy from one “base keyword” + modifier A page to a page targeting “base keyword” + modifer B, the newer page will probably get filtered as a duplicate or low value page?

This is true both in sales-driven businesses and in lead-driven businesses…

The Internet holds a wealth of information on virtually any topic one could think of. With a simple search, you can gain access to knowledge about almost any subject out there.

In fact, you can often get so much information returned that it’s a little intimidating even knowing where to start. Information overload gets more and more common as ever-growing amounts of information go online…

 Well folks, this may be the biggest tool introduction since Ryan Seacrest started hosting American Idol. Today we are launching our SEO toolbar for Google’s Chrome browser. This sexy beast is full to the brim with SEO insight and time-saving SEO goodness. This free add-on is ripe for picking and available for download right this second.

  Ask and Ye Shall Receive

Whether it’s from Twitter, Facebook, email or comments here on the blog, almost every day we get some sort of request for a Chrome Toolbar…

Perhaps part of the “interesting data” Richard Rosenblatt was talking about was link anchor text on expired domains & cybersquatting efforts that he could redirect in bulk at high earning eHow pages.

Not to fear, Demand Media is a trusted Google partner, so the algorithm and engineers are prohibited to take action against the same activity which would get your website removed from the search results…

Loved the latest YouMoz post on SEOmoz by Oli Gardner (Co-Founder of Unbounce.com) who combines 2 of our favorite topics together: Infographics and Landing Pages. Oli provides a 12 step infographic detailing how to rehab your landing pages. Landing page tips and infographic below:

1. One Page Per Source
2. A/B Testing
3. Ad Message Match
4. Context of Use
5. Videos Increase Conversion
6. Direction Cues
7. Data vs…