Maktoob may not be a site with which many American search experts are familiar, and similarly, Yahoo's name probably isn't something Arabic-speaking individuals are used to seeing on a daily basis. But an introduction of sorts has occurred, as Yahoo Search is now powering Maktoob, which is the largest online Arabic-language community. Yahoo announced its interest in acquiring Maktoob in August of last year, and at the time,

Discovery; where SEO starts' Long before you start to worry about actually ranking content, you need to get it into the index. And of course, to do that, your content needs to be found . In the world of information retrieval this is, appropriately enough, known as ' discovery '. This in itself can be known as a few things including ' data mining ' ' knowledge discovery ' and so on. Regardless of the terminology,

Image by SESConferenceSeries via Flickr As SES Chicago 2009, I asked Matt Van Wagner of Lobster.com to share some of his tastiest search engine marketing tips. (Pun intended.) I should disclose that I was born in California and raised in Michigan. So, when I moved to Massachusetts, I had to learn how to pronounce "lobster" correctly. It's "lobstah." If you don't pronounce it correctly, then the native New Englanders will know you're a "blow in." Van Wagner,

Scott Brown made headlines with his one-day "Money Bomb" fundraiser that became a week-long phenomenon raking in millions for the newly-elected Senator from Massachusetts. Now, Republican primary candidate for Senate in Florida, Marco Rubio (he's running an increasingly tight race against Governor Charlie Crist) is using a similar tactic. That's Rubio pictured below at "Bike Night" in Clearwater, FL the other night. And,

Online shoppers experience more website slow downs and other problems completing transactions during popular shopping periods when traffic to retail websites peaks, according to a new survey by Equation Research conducted on behalf of web performance firm Gomez. At stake is the $1,050 that each online shopper spends annually, according to the survey, with a significant amount of spending done during these peak times.

Award winning BBC comedy personality, Peter Serafinowicz , has released a video in which he shows the latest revolution from Apple, the iPad . What did you think of the video? Let us know . Im sure by now youve figured out this isnt the real iPad well I guess it could be as this one doesnt feature a camera either. ;) This spoof of Apples announcement is from Funny or Dies UK site . Serafinowicz seems to be both poking fun at Steve Jobs and the following video,

Since its been a while since weve had a post with an at-a-glance view of typical optimization strategies for trouble areas, I thought it was time we revisit this topic. As this is meant to be useful to readers across a wide spectrum of experience.

Last year, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada investigated Facebook as a result of several complaints. Then the Privacy Commissioner made some recommendations, Facebook followed them, and all in all, both sides remained quite friendly. Only now another probe's been launched, and the privacy advocate sounds less patient this time. This investigation was prompted by another user complaint,

Many of you began blogging to get more business. I'm sorry to tell you that many of you are doing the exact opposite. Your blog isn't getting you more business " it's actually sending business away. How did that happen? A blog is supposed to create more interest in what you do or what you sell. It's supposed to bring you more credibility, more readers. It's supposed to show off your expertise. All that should be great for business. Where did it all go wrong?

Local SEO is not just something that might help a business anymore, it will. In today's business space it is absolutely vital for all business to position themselves in search results appropriately so that local visitors can easily locate a business. I speak with people each and every day that think that SEO is the best thing since sliced bread.  Well, I think it is, but SEO, specifically local SEO is fairly complex these days and includes different areas of search.