The back-and-forth over Street View in Germany has been fierce at times, with one Google representative recently hinting that the company intended to move forward as long as German authorities didn't draft laws against the program. But now Google's given in a bit, offering people a way to keep their properties out of Street View from the start. Apparently Google decided a confrontation wasn't in its best interest.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will be delivering a keynote address at SMX West in Santa Clara at 9:00am PST/12:00pm EST. WebProNews new will be streaming it live at our new live video site live.webpronews.com . This will mark Ballmer's first address to the search marketing community, and he is expected to talk about Microsoft's progress in the search world (with Bing obviously), as well as the company's future. More than likely, the famous Microsoft-Yahoo deal will be discussed.

This is the final installment of a three-part series on how to translate advice from marketing guru Dan Kennedy to a new online environment. One of the smartest thing any online marketer can do is to study the "old school" guys who wrote direct mail, magazine ads, and other artifacts of advertising history. Why? Because it took a tremendous understanding of the psychology of persuasion to make those tactics work.

Is this the year of mobile? Thats a question Ive been asked every year since I joined Microsoft in 2005. And while Im not a medium, what I will say is that the increasing use of mobile phones for everyday tasks like surfing the web, social networking, reading the news, watching video and searching has created a new vigour amongst marketers keen to harness the power of targeting consumers on the move. At Microsoft Advertising we have a number of ways to get into mobile,

With SMX West this week, I was going to hold off on the 2nd part of my hands-on SEO Audit series.  Then I remembered that heck - I'm not going to be there so I bet enough other people in our industry won't either that it will be a great way to give all the non-attendees a leg-up on the competition, as they all run around the conference hoping to grab actionable information.  :-) If you haven't read part 1 in this series,

The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) has asked the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to investigate the online marketing and behavioral targeting practices of pharmaceutical companies. The CDD says few U.S. health consumers are aware they are being identified, labeled, profiled, and tracked on the Internet while they search or access information on specific conditions or concerns. "The health and safety of U.S.

The capital city of Kansas really, really wants Google to build it a high-speed broadband network. Indeed, rather than stick to the standard email campaigns and Facebook groups, its efforts to catch the search giant's attention have extended to the mayor renaming Topeka "Google." At least temporarily. This is no joke or repaint-the-town-sign prank. According to Tim Hrenchir ,

by Mike Moran Image via CrunchBase When my friend called me, there was a little panic in his voice. He owned a successful, customer-friendly small business, and was generally an easygoing person. But he didn't know what to do. A long-time and loyal customer alerted him to a savage review of his business on an Internet Yellow Pages site. And so now he was turning to me to find out what he could do about it. I asked him for the details and he ruefully related the story.

Competition is stiff these days. It's getting harder and harder to achieve optimal search engine rankings, at least without professional help. So how to compete in a space where it might not be feasible to increase rankings for your most competitive keywords? Believe it or not , there are actually plenty of ways to leverage existing visibility to increase traffic. To name a few: Test Meta descriptions .

Welcome to another edition of ' 7 Days of Search and Social ' - Hey gang' I am going to keep this short and sweet today as it's me B-day and I am trying to keep a low profile. Of note, it was on my birthday last year when I started this newsletter'So a happy anniversary to all those great writers out there that keep the SEO space vibrant. This past week was a very good one as far as search geeky goodiness is concerned' So let's git r done!