YouTube is now allowing advertisers to incorporate a "Call-to-Action overlay" on their videos. With the overlay, advertisers can drive traffic to their sites where they can make purchases, sign up for email newsletters or whichever action an advertiser wishes. The Call-to-Action overlays are available for Promoted Videos only. Promoted Videos, you may remember, are essentially the paid search of YouTube. They were once called Sponsored Videos ,

Canadians are a funny lot. They use strange words and spell with a U. They kiss cod. They enjoy being frozen solid nearly 8 months a year, and they call their money Loonies and Toonies. Don't get me wrong; they're nice people just the same. They're nature lovers and humanitarian and they like things simple and friendly. And contrary to popular belief, they're actually pretty smart. But there's just one problem. Your marketing strategies?

Posted by RobOusbey We all like links from big sites right? Whether it's in an editorial article, a guest post, etc, it's great for sending some strength and trust to your site. However, the drawback of links from big sites, is that you might find it's on a small page. The newly published page will take some time to get indexed, much of it's strength (certainly initially) is likely to come from internal links, and it's unlikely to have a great crawl rate.

by Vera H-C Chan Nothing better to start the hot days of July than with some Tommy gun action. Unfortunately, director Michael Mann's mediocrity streak may be continuing with " Public Enemies ," which packs star power but no pow with critics. (Time, for instance, tosses in adjectives like "perfunctory," "wall-eyed," and "predictable.") A misfire or not, the movie's already stirred up a Search homage of sorts for killer folk hero John Dillinger , AKA Public Enemy No. 1.

When the news about Michael Jackson's death broke out, it was TMZ who scooped it beating other news outlets and was quoted as a source throughout Twitter, Facebook , traditional media and various online properties. As a result, Hitwise numbers are showing that TMZ's site traffic on that day was able to achieve a 3 year all-time high. The news created a spike and brought a 5x increase in volume as compared to the previous day's site traffic.

SEOquake addon developers continue to impress us with always new awesome tools. This time they are launching a new one called SEOpivot . This tool finds your site most promising keywords by looking at your site current Google rankings and identifying most powerful words that your site already ranks high enough. In a way, the tool works the way I described in a previous article on doing keyword research for an established site . Our report will show you all keywords,

Expect more of these kinds of post in the next couple of days as search analysts will be on the lookout for statistics on Bing's first month of operation. The latest of these data is coming from StatCounter which is reporting that Microsoft's search market share went up to 8.5% one month after Bing's launch. Although Bing's  market share is still miles away from Google's , Microsoft would be glad to know that part of  the increase from previous month's 7.

Rand Fishkin wrote a great blog post in answer to this question posed by someone, "If a client came to you with $1 million to invest in a single Internet marketing channel, which one would you choose?" First off, Rand and I both agree that's a ridiculous question, but it's useful in that it opens up a philosophical jar of worms that most search marketers aren't willing to explore. He answered the questions much the same way I would have.

Posted by randfish My good friend, Aaron Kahlow , posed an interesting question during the Online Marketing Summit yesterday afternoon in Portland, OR. Aaron asked: If a client came to you with $1 million to invest in a single Internet marketing channel, which one would you choose? Obviously, the question is a bit ridiculous (given that there's no additional detail provided), but it's designed to elicit an "off-the-cuff" response to a challenging scenario. The answer,

Flickr has just introduced a new feature that it should have done long ago - Flickr2Twitter. If you use Flickr, this new feature would allow you to post uploaded photos directly from your Flickr to your Twitter account. Flickr2Twitter will create a shortened URL for your photo and post this as Tweet to your Twitter account. To use this feature, you would need to authorize Flickr to access your Twitter account. You will only need to do this once.