We have spent some time updating our beginner’s guide to search engine marketing this week, including — for instance — new tips on the use of social media in search engine marketing.

Here are some recent search engine marketing and optimization news articles that might be of interest.

Google Starts Showing Author Images In Search Results
SE Land: Online authors are now being highlighted in Google’s search results … if they’re using the recently announced rel=author markup language.

Screen Shots Of Google Analytics SEO Reports
SE Roundtable: The most exciting feature I received from Google was getting into the beta of the Google Analytics SEO reports! Yes, I am in. I can see some really cool insights, such as impressions, clicks and CTR tied into the other reports. Now keep in mind, Google Analytics lets you do some fancy custom reports, so the SEO data can work with almost anything in Google Analytics. Let me show you some basic reports.

Google’s Matt Cutts on PR Updates
SE Journal: Yes, PageRank is still a thing, it will still be updated, and there’s no current indication that it’s being diminished as a ranking factor.

Google+ “Pages” Coming For Businesses
SE Land: Google’s head of Commerce and Local Jeff Huber confirmed what some people were hoping for: the imminent arrival of Google+ pages for entities.

Google: Stop With The Tin Foil Hat SEO
SE Roundtable: A Google Webmaster Help thread has Googler Susan Moskwa replying to one webmaster about them wanting to remove content from their own web site. The webmaster was thinking because they don’t have a certain number of words on some of their content, they are better off removing the content because it can hurt the rankings of the rest of the web site.

Yahoo Shutting Down Site Explorer This Year
SE Land: Yahoo makes it sound like that you won’t miss the old Site Explorer but I find it hard to believe that Microsoft will provide detailed link data for competitors. Of course there are plenty of third party tools to get at this data, such as Majestic SEO and SEOmoz but with the loss of Site Explorer, there will likely be no search engine-provided look at your back links. See also Yahoo! Search Blog: Microsoft Webmaster Tools to support Yahoo! Site Explorer Community.

Bing teams up with Jay Z to take on Google
TNW: Fans were able to track down the new pages in the book using Bing maps and clues left within Bing search engines and social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. The average time spent on the campaign site was a whopping 11 minutes and Jay Z grew his Facebook fans by one million as a result.