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comScore has released UK search engine share data for June 2008. Here’s how it breaks down:

Other notable findings from June 2008:

• There were 3.9 billion total searches conducted in the U.K. during the month.
• 31 million U.K. Internet users conducted at least one search.
• U.K. searchers conducted an average of 124 searches per searcher during the month, or 4.1 searches per day.
• U.K. searchers made a combined total of 937 billion visits to a search engine in May, with an average of 4.1 searches per visit.

Over at Yahoo’s Search Marketing blog, Marketing Communications Manager Roger Park is offering up tips on converting your search ads. He breaks down a bunch of best practices principles to three main steps: Optimize, Navigate and Track.

Optimize

Optimizing your landing pages is crucial to a profitable search marketing campaign. Park advises:

• Have a “deep link” to a product on your site
• Offer several contact methods
• Online shopping carts should be secure and easily visible
• Remove broken links
• Have good server availability

Navigate

Park encourages site owners and developers to put themselves in the shoes of their web site visitors. I personally have found that many of my clients have a difficult time being able to do this. They’re just too close to their business. So, it was nice that Park also served up some tangible tips:

• Create an obvious pathway to the product that the visitor searched for
• Don’t have too many layers between the landing page and the end goal - no more than 2 clicks
• If the end goal is sale, move non-commercial content below the fold

Track

Successful marketing campaigns are built on solid data. Consistently evaluate your data and tweak your paid search campaigns accordingly. Yahoo’s conversion-only analytics tool can help you do that. The tool can help you analyze keywords, tweak landing pages, and improve under-performing ads.

What do you think of Park’s advice? Anything else you would add to the mix? Share your ideas in the comments!

Mobile advertising revenue is expected to dwarf current ad spend on search and content networks. In today’s Content Advertising column, “Google Mobile Advertising: Start Now!,” David Szetela breaks down the dynamics of mobile search advertising as an essential starting point to creating great mobile content ad campaigns.

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Search Engine Strategies London has wrapped up Day Two and the 2,000 attendees have adjourned until this morning. Meanwhile, the bloggers, videographers and photographers covering SES London have posted another batch of blog posts, YouTube videos and Flickr photos. Here are the ones that I found this morning/evening (depending on the time zone you’re in):

SES London 2008: Day 2 Roundup Feb. 20, 2008. This YouTube video includes just some of my interviews with speakers at Search Engine Strategies London yesterday. (More to come over the next few days and weeks.) Andy Beal, Consultant, Blogger & Author, Marketing Pilgrim LLC, gives positive reviews (however ambivalent his accent) of his own sessions and those he sat in on for their direct applicability to increasing revenue and extensive use of case studies. Piers Stobbs, VP of Comscore Networks, previews his big-picture presentations on user trends in search with implications for search marketing, such as increases in frequency and familiarity/capability of individual searchers. Jim Sterne, Chairman of the Web Analytics Association, evangelizes on behalf of website testing, and breaks down in brief the web analytics players between free and paid packages and their various advantages in increasing ROI. And Jon Myers, Head of Search at MediaVest, provides some down-to-earth comments on dealing with click fraud.

Video: Interview with Adam Lasnik of Google by Lee Odden, who was able to catch up with the Google Search Evangelist to do a short (10 min) video on several topics important to web masters looking for better results on Google.

SES London 2008. More than 60 photos on Flickr provide an overview of the speakers, attendees and exhibitors at the Business Design Centre in Islington.

SES London Day Two Photos by Lee Odden. Additional pictures from Search Engine Strategies London capture the highlights of the event.

SES London 2008 - A Few Pictures by Mel Carson. Even more photos from the event.

SES London 08: The Changing World of Search, Keynote Roundtable by Li Evans, who covers the video from Nick Carr and panel discussion of Microsoft’s unsolicited bid for Yahoo.

SES London 08: News Search Optimisation by Li Evans, who covers the News Search SEO session.

SES London 08: Video & Podcast SEO by Li Evans, who covers the Video & Podcast SEO session.

SES London 2008 - Competitive Research by Simon Heseltine, who covers the Competitive Research session.

Ralph Wilson’s Introduction to Search Marketing at SES London by Amanda Watlington, who covers the Introduction to Search Marketing session.

Search Engine Strategies - London - Video & Podcast SEO by Mal Watlington, who also covers the Video & Podcast SEO session.

Nofollow, What a Load of Crap! by David Fairhurst, who covers the Organic Listings Forum.

SES Update #1 by Rick Bosch, who provides half a dozen observations from the event.

SES Update #2 by Rick Bosch, who covers the Search Engine Friendly Design session.

Collapsed Lungs & Micro-hoo: SES London Day 2, Part 1 by ciaran, who covers the keynote, News Search SEO session, and Search Term Research and Targeting session.

SES Audience: Pro-Merger by Andrew Goodman, who polled the audience: “From your standpoint as a marketer using these ad platforms: would you prefer that Yahoo remain an independent company, or that Microsoft and Yahoo merge to form a single #2 vendor in the space?”

Pilgrim’s Picks for February 20 - London Edition by Andy Beal, who links to the coverage of Search Engine Strategies London by Li Evans.

Off to London to Tempt Scottie and Simon by Jennifer Laycock, who is hopping a flight to London.

SES London Day Two Recap by Barry Schwartz, who provides a roundup of coverage.

What a Blackhat SEO Looks Like by Barry Schwartz, who comments on one of the photos from the show by Lee Odden.

SES London and SES New York by Jason, who will be going to the post-con party organized by LondonSEO.

Search Engine Strategy à Londres by Estelle Schomann, who provides a roundup of the coverage in French.

På vej til SES og SMX by Mikkel deMib Svendsen, who writes something in Danish that I’m sure is insightful, if I could read Danish.

SEO Headlines by Lisa Barone, who says she is being “ranty” today because she can’t be in London for SES.

Want a snapshot of the day’s search marketing news? Here we’ve collected today’s top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

• SEO for Reputation Management
  One way to combat the threat of negative branding is through a reputation management strategy, which can begin with search engine optimization (SEO).
• Google Bar Codes and Three Martini Lunches
  Search marketing firms have a tremendous competitive advantage over traditional ad agencies. Managing campaigns based on ROI is second nature.
• Balogh Named New Yahoo CTO
  Aristotle “Ari” Balogh, 43, was named CTO for Yahoo today.
• Marchex to Distribute Ads from Superpages Advertisers
  Advertisers who buy placements on Idearc’s Superpages.com local search site will now be able to get the added distribution over Marchex’s network of more than 200,000 vertically-focused local sites, as well as more than 50 partner ad networks and vertical sites.
• Measuring PR in cold, hard cash
  Counting press clips has been a bogus PR metric for more than 20 years. So, what are the right PR metrics in the age of search engines?
• SEMPO Nominees for Board of Directors
  The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization has announced the nominees for its 2008 board of directors.
• SEW Experts: The Future of Search: All the Media That’s Fit to Be Googled
  The battle between search engines and human beings has moved to a new stage where online advertising and search ads are overtaking the search engine.
• SEW Experts: Online Retail SEO: Holiday Shopping Seasonality
  The Q4 holiday season makes or breaks the success of online retail. Yet many companies don’t realize how important the holidays are for SEO.
• SEW Experts: SEO Millionaire: Who Wants to Be One? - Part 2
  Last week, we challenged SEOs to identify which of the big three travel sites has a canonical issue. Now we give you the answer.
• Search not understood and used in PR campaigns
  PR experts recognize that social media has changed the practice of PR. Search, however, is not part of the PR lexicon yet.

Click to read the rest of this post…

The Q4 holiday season makes or breaks the success of online retail. Yet many companies don’t realize how important the holidays are for SEO. In today’s Big Biz column, “Online Retail SEO: Holiday Shopping Seasonality,” Aaron Shear outlines a variety of factors revolving around seasonality that retailers must take into account for SEO to be successful.

If a company’s big enough, a site outage lasting only five minutes is an embarrassing issue.  "Over 12 hours" is pretty terrible, then, and this is the amount of time for which Blockbuster Online ceased to work.
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As a new search marketing firm, what kinds of clients will best fit your business? In today’s Business of Search column, “Win the Right Search Marketing Clients,” Fionn Downhill breaks down the benefits and drawbacks of working with start-ups and small businesses, mid-sized businesses, and large organizations.

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sew experts win the right [...]

The Range Online Media SEO team completed an audit of the political candidates’ sites, and found glaring holes in search strategy on virtually all of the sites of major candidates and minor players on both sides of the aisle. In today’s SearchDay, “SEO for President,” Range’s Herndon Hasty breaks down the biggest search-related issues on [...]

OK, so we all know what people are really searching for most of the time. But if you filter out the perennial favorites (most of which are NSFW), then you can have a look at the most popular, up-and-coming search terms of 2007. In case you missed these earlier, here are the lists of top [...]