Happy Halloween, readers! Now that the big day is upon us, let’s have a look at the top costumes and search trends for Halloween 2011. Google, Yahoo, and SortPrice have shared the top user searches and trends for Halloween costumes and other…

Sensitive to privacy issues surrounding ad targeting, Google is opening the kimono to consumers about why certain search and Gmail ads are targeted to certain people. The company is launching an additional section to its ad preference center — where users can already manage targeting criteria… Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article

This story originally appeared on ClickZ: Christopher Heine wrote Google Mirrors Facebook’s Deal Aggregation Strategy Google evidently believes better targeting will turn a deals strategy previously tried – and abandoned – by Facebook int…

Posted by jennita About a year ago, we started talking about how we wanted to find a way to meet more people from the community in person. Sure we all get to know each other online through the blog, on Twitter or maybe in Q&A, but it’s nothing like getting to meet people face-to-face. There becomes a bond or friendship once you actually know each other that helps to build a community.

Happy Halloween! For the special day, most of the search engines and portals have special logos or themes on their home pages. In fact, Google’s logo was carved and filmed at Google and that made up what you see as the Google Logo for Halloween in 2011. Note, one of the pumpkins was 1,298 pounds!

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…

Last month, we had a look at an InboundWriter study that showed how search and social intelligence provided to writers during the content creation process can increase quality score, time on page, search traffic, and conversion to sale.

In paid search, it’s one thing to get a click but it’s completely something else to get a visitor to convert. To get a high enough ROI to make paid search profitable, practitioners need to be proficient not only in PPC optimization tactics, but also have ninja techniques on how to…

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

Search Marketing Now, our sister site, will host two webcasts this week. Tomorrow, November 1, Maria Pergolino of Marketo will deliver a presentation on “Content Marketing Success with Search and Social Optimization”. She’ll cover what marketers need to know to build the best…