Found in the search marketing forums: What Do You Call Yourselves?; How Can SEO Benefit My Company and My Clients?; Has SEM Replaced Public Relations?; and more.

Featured posts to the Search Engine Watch blog in the past week, along with recent search-related headlines from around the Web.

The new Ask3D interface aims to align Ask's search results pages more closely with the way people actually search.

While some industry-watchers are cheering Google's recent moves, others are yawning. Range Online's Phil Stelter digs into what Universal Search really means for Google, and for search marketers.

A new study finds that more search marketers are able to measure ROI than could two years ago, and more search marketers' jobs are being measured against both search metrics and overall business results.

Found in the search marketing forums: ROI Tracking Between Lead and Sale; Determining Commercial Intent; Yahoo Click Charges to be Based on Quality of Traffic; and more.

Featured posts to the Search Engine Watch blog in the past week, along with recent search-related headlines from around the Web.

Are bid management tools still useful, or have they outlived their purpose?

Having an in-house SEO team can be beneficial, and is especially important for large organizations with large and complex sites. But you need to lay a strong foundation in order to be successful.

Successfully building an in-house SEO team requires coordination between many parts of the organization, with defined targets and a plan to reach those targets.

I just noticed that the Virtual TechEd folks recently published ScottGu's " A Lap Around Silverlight" talk. Watch (or download) it now BTW, @~30:00 did you get the joke from the audience? the "fruit box" is a macbook that shows up later in the talk ;-) Enjoy Read More......(read more)

I've been asked several times by customers, "Can I send a poll via email in Lotus Notes and have the recipients reply with their vote". Well the answer is, not "out of the box", but due to the flexibility and power of Notes, of course you can set this up in just a few minutes! This tip explains how to create a button in an email message which when pressed, prompts the reader to enter their vote, and automatically sends the response back to the address you define.

Several people have asked about how to make the contents of their tabs load when the user first clicks them, thereby reducing initial page size. I can think of several ways to do this with varying levels of complexity, but here's away you can do right now with minimal hacking. We'll think about how to build this in. But for now... Basically we can do this with UpdatePanels. What we'll do is: Add an UpdatePanel inside each TabPanel Add a hidden button to trigger that update panel Add a Panel with Visible="false" that has the content we want to load inside of it (Visible false prevents it from rendering at all) Write some JavaScript to trigger that button. Let's get started. First, we just create an empty AJAX Enabled project and drop an AjaxControlToolkit...(read more)

The new .reflector assembly list file feature of .NET Reflector can be used to streamline the class browsing experience for Script#... Read More......(read more)

The website is called How Software Is Built , and it's an investigation of the similarities and differences of closed-source* versus open-source delivery models and I've been reading it for a while. I always learn something from each of the people that they interview. The project was "commissioned" by folks here at MS, but if you want details, click here . A month or two ago I got a request from a group of folks to talk about software developement methodologies here at Microsoft, specifically how we relate to Open Source, etc. It was kind of unexpected (what? who? me?) but it was a fun conversation, that just got posted today. Check it out . I'd quote from it but it feels really weird quoting myself on my blog. You'll just have to read it. Read...(read more)

Sorry for the outage yesturday!

Daniel Moth has a good post describing .NET Framework 3.5 ... I though i'd share part of it here as it is likely better than one I could do... thanks Daniel. Our goal with the .NET Framework 3.5 was to make it very easy for customers to adopt while providing some really interesting new value. The "easy to adopt" comes from what we call the "Redbits".. There we are using the same core bits as .NET Framework 2.0 and 3.0 (we just rolled in an SP1 to fix customer reported issues and such)... there should be no breaking changes there and these SPs will be made available on windows update for everyone with 2.0 andor 3.0... The new value comes from the "greenbits" that are brand new assemblies. Daniel also has a good list of the new stuff in .NET...(read more)

Apple are now making a Windows version of Safari. What does that mean for us web developers?

We heard laud and clear at Teched that folks wanted to see more of acroplis... So here we are the first day back from TechEd and we have three new videos including source code... Catch all the action at: http://windowsclient.net/acropolis/ Enjoy! Using Acropolis PartPanes The Acropolis PartPane allows you to host the views of child parts within the views of their parent components. In addition, the PartPane provides a chrome, which exposes some of your parts' functionality to the user automatically, and helps to provide a uniform visual experience for nested parts. This presentation demonstrates how to use the PartPane, and introduces some of its features. Author: David Poll Duration: 5 minutes, 22 seconds Video Downloads: WMV | Zune | iPod...(read more)

Huh, interesting. Seems like I heard some rumors about this, but I didn't see that one coming. Honestly, this is the best news I've heard all week (okay, fine, it's noon on Monday). We've got a couple of Macs here on site over a VPC type setup but using them is still a bit of a pain - you have to prop to IIS, log into the machine, etc. Being able to do some level of smoke testing right from the desktop will make this a lot easier. That is, of course, as long as the Mac and Windows Safari continue to act the same. Like iTunes, Safari is styles like a Mac window, so it's a little odd to see it running on the desktop with all the Vista-themed stuff. But right a way you can pick out the distinctive way that it does it's font rendering. Yup, looks...(read more)