The latest news from the world of search engine marketing and optimization.

Learning SEO? Here are some tips
State of Search: The SEO community’s favorite online resources.

Is SEO Really SEO Anymore? Index Search Down 50%, Apps and Social Search Exploding
SE Journal: Search has moved to sites like Wikipedia and other popular content sites. Search in the app store is up. People have made a the statement that they prefer branded content form apps they trust, rather than sorting through links on a SERP.

The Madness Of Keyword Monomania: The Pathological Obsession With A Single Keyword
SE People: So you’ve got a brand new SEO client and they want you to take them to number 1 for the biggest keyword in their sector.

Google Image Search Optimization Now More Important To SEO
WebProNews: Images were already important to SEO, but if they’re going to inject more images into the first-page organic results mix for more queries, this is another opportunity to get your content in front of searchers’ eyeballs.

Search quality highlights: 40 changes for February
Google presents the latest changes in its search algorithm, presentation and products.

The Late, Great Bounce Rate Debate
SEO Theory: 1 question and 2 very brief but complex responses from SMX West 2012 are already receiving undue attention and emphasis. On a panel with two search engine representatives Danny Sullivan asked if “Bounce Rate” is used as a factor in their ranking results. Several journalists and bloggers boiled it down to “YES”, but what the search representatives ACTUALLY said was more along the lines of “Bounce Rate combined with other signals may affect your site’s performance in our results”.

How Google Makes Liars Out of the Good Guys in SEO
seomoz: It’s sad to think that if I wanted to rank well for keywords in my industry, writing this post, getting comments on it, and engaging in the community by answering questions counts LESS to help us rank well for targeted competitive keywords than me getting 20 anchor text links on a tag page? (See also John Doherty’s response to this post).

78 Resources For Every Internet Marketer’s Toolkit
SE Watch: Dave Davies has put together his 78 favorite resources based on what they yield and what they procude from a dollar-in-dollar-out perspective.

Non-Google Link Strategy: An Example of Stealth Link Marketing
Eric Ward: To begin, let’s rid ourselves of the term “link builder.” Link building is a terribly inaccurate description of the approaches that savvy link developers and link marketers can use for generating links to client’s content.

How to Do Keyword Research
SE Journal: Inforgraphic that tells you how to find the stages that you should pass selecting proper keywords.

See also:

Search Engine News Wrap-up March 4
Social Media Wrap-up March 4