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We will not be publishing on Thursday, November 27, or Friday, November 28, in observation of Thanksgiving Day. I hope those of you that are celebrating the holiday can stay off the Internet and spend some time with those you love.

For those of you that aren’t celebrating Thanksgiving, or have had enough quality time with your family, here are a few things you might find interesting:

* If you haven’t checked it out lately, I suggest looking over the articles in our Search 101 section. It’s been updated with articles covering the basics of search engine optimization, search advertising, and several other topics. Keep an eye on that section, as it will continue to be updated on a regular basis.

* We’ve been collecting quite the archive of Search Engine Marketing Webcasts. We’ve got one-hour presentations with Q&A available on demand on topics from Holiday PPC campaigns to search trends, to Profitable PPC fundamentals. You can also sign up for upcoming webcasts, including one next week on Advanced Keyword Research.

* Catch up with other Thanksgiving refugees on the Search Engine Watch Forums, or browse the archives to find the best advice on a range of search marketing topics.

* Head on over to Facebook to join the SearchEngineWatch Facebook Group or the Search Engine Strategies Facebook Group. Or check out our LinkedIn Groups for Search Engine Watch, SearchEngineWatch.com Forums, or Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo.

We’ll be back on Monday with plenty of new Experts columns, blog posts, and more. Have a happy Thanksgiving!

Okay, I understand that we’re all trying to “give a jolt” to the economy. But I was still surprised today when Lycos provided a list of Christmas gift ideas two days before Thanksgiving Day. Aren’t we all supposed to wait until Black Friday?

Nevertheless, for shoppers who like planning ahead — or for online retailers and etailers looking for what will be hot this holiday season — Lycos just announced its ninth annual list of the most popular toys and video games, based on web search activity.

(For a complete list and commentary of the Lycos Top Toys and Video Games of 2008, go to the Lycos 50. You can also voice your opinion on this year’s list, and weigh in on weekly Internet trends and pop culture on the Lycos 50 Blog or follow the Lycos 50 on Twitter.)

It shouldn’t come as a shock that Apple’s iPod holds the top spot as the #1 most-searched for toy this holiday season. But this year, the Apple frenzy includes hot-searched items like the iTouch and iPod Nano.

Harry Potter, at #11, makes a fifth consecutive appearance in 2008, with Harry Potter games, books and DVDs dominating Harry Potter-themed searches.

New in 2008 is KOTA, the Triceratops Dinosaur (#15), generating more search interest than Fisher Price’s New Elmo Live (#19). Meanwhile, not so hot in 2008 are Hannah Montana-related toy items, which made a big splash in 2007, but fail to make this year’s list.

Spongebob Squarepants (#14) takes over as the top licensed character-themed toy of 2008. Spongebob was last seen on the Lycos Top Toy list in 2005. And when it comes to dolls, Barbie (#6) continues to reign, extending her run on the annual Lycos list of Top Toys and Video Games to nine consecutive years of appearing in the Top 10. But there’s not enough data on Caribou Barbie to see if that will be a big hit this year — let alone in 2012.

Gaming consoles see a big resurgence in search popularity in 2008, with the Nintendo Wii (#10) capturing the most search interest, generating 25% more search activity than the Xbox 360 (#12) and Playstation 3 (#13). Also seeing a resurgence in 2008 are old school classics like Monopoly (#17), despite the current housing market.

Five of the top 25 toys in 2008 originate from the popular world of anime including Naruto (#3), Pokemon (#4), Dragonball (#5), Inuyasha (#7) and Gundam (#16). Meanwhile, one new toy making the 2008 list may be unfamiliar to most adults, but if search activity is any indication, expect the Bakugan Battle Brawlers (#24) to be flying off the shelves this holiday season.

On the video game front, the massive multi-player game RuneScape (#1) scores big with web users for the fourth consecutive year as the most-searched video game of 2008, while Final Fantasy makes its first appearance on the list since 2005, with Final Fantasy XIII (#3). Also racking up points online, making first-ever appearances on the top video games list, are war-themed games including Call of Duty: World at War (#9) and Gears of War 2 (#14), while Guitar Hero World Tour (#8) and Wii Fit (#15) are the most popular Wii-themed games based on web searches in 2008.

Also new in 2008 are Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games Fable 2 (#17), Fallout 3 (#18), Street Fighter IV (#10), Dead Space (#19), Far Cry 2 (#22) and BioShock (#25). This also marks the fourth consecutive year the Madden football-themed games fail to make Lycos’s Top Toys and Video Games list.

As for me, I don’t do any Christmas shopping until the very last minute. That way, I don’t have to figure where to hide presents where my three kids (or wife) can find them before December 24th. Yep, when I say “last minute Christmas shopping” I mean last minute shopping. You’d be surprised how simple decisions are on Christmas eve.

Whether you plan to hire a designer or figure it out for yourself, there are definitely some best practices you should follow when designing your Web site. In today’s small business search engine marketing column, “25 Design Best Practices for Your Small Business Web Site,” Carrie Hill offers a list to get a good start on finding the best Web site platform and design elements for your businesses audience.

» Full story

Seems Microsoft is moving to finalize the renaming of Live Search to Kumo, according to LiveSide.net. The possibility has been discussed at various times this year.

Renaming and branding moves by search engines have not had much luck. Ask.coms removal of Jeeves seemed to hurt them, FindWhat and eSpotting merger and rename to Miva definitely impacted the companies, so there is data for not making the changes.

True GoClick to Overture went okay - but then they had a great product in a growing market - just like BackRub and Google…. but that was really prepublic launch.

If the move goes through will be well worth tracking.

Google has released a new feature to its search results. It’s called SearchWiki and it lets searchers, while signed into their Google account, customize their own results.

When you do a search, you can move results around. If a result is third, you can move it to first. (You SEOs are going to looooove that [detect my sarcasm]).

You can make notes about search results. If you return to the same results, you will find them the way you left them last time.

Your changes only affect YOUR searches. Check out this vid for more:

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I spoke at PubCon last week — about How SMBs Can Use PR Campaigns To Grow Traffic and Alternative Discovery and SEO - Feeds, PDFs, and Blog SEO.

But, enough about me. Let’s talk about the top trends spotted at last week’s search engine and Internet marketing conference and expo in Vegas, baby!

For the record, I not only spoke at PubCon, I also looked at the 88 articles about it in Google News, the 77 articles in Yahoo! News, the 406 posts in Google Blog Search from the past month, and the 799 posts that IceRocket has found from the past month.

Then, I used a new tool called Twist, which lets you see trends in Twitter, to chart the hundreds of Tweets about PubCon over the past 30 days.

But, I could have just as easily looked at the session agenda grid for PubCon. Why? Because Brett Tabke, PubCon’s organizer, had set most of the agenda for 2009 when he selected the keynote speakers and creating the conference tracks. That’s why.

So, it was dead easy to spot the top trends at the six-track educational conference hosted by SearchEngineWorld and WebmasterWorld. Heck, even the most sleep-deprived attendee would know they were video, blogs and Twitter.

Video is hot — and YouTube video is red hot. This was reflected in the choice of George Wright, the VP Marketing & Sales at Blendtec, as one of the keynote speakers.

Described as the “The best viral marketing campaign ever,” George’s viral marketing campaign, “Will it Blend?,” has changed the face and the future of online marketing. Seen by more than 100 million people on the Internet and reported on by traditional media outlets like the Today Show, the Tonight Show, and the History Channel, Will it Blend? continues to deliver unprecedented corporate awareness through social media channels. This new form of marketing has delivered a 700% increase in sales for Blendtec, a small Utah based blender manufacturer, with an initial investment of $50.

Oh, and in case you didn’t notice that video is hot, Brett added a Video and Multimedia track with five sessions to drive the point home.

Blogs were big, too. This was reflected in three tracks at PubCon: one on Social Media Marketing, another on Social, Brand, and Reputation Management, and a third on Linking as Social Media Networking.

Now, blogs certainly aren’t considered the “newbies” of the social media scene – “granddaddies” is probably a more appropriate name. But that gives them an advantage from a marketing perspective – the medium has matured and moved from early adopter phase to the mainstream. That means more consumers are not only reading blogs; they are being influenced by blog content when it comes to what they decide to buy and who they decide to buy it from.

If you want a second opinion, sign up for tomorrow’s free webinar: “Consumers and the Influence of Blogs: What it Means for Your Marketing Mix.” It starts at 2:00 P.M. EST/11:00 A.M. PST and will be moderated by Kevin Ryan, SES Advisory Board Chair and CEO of Motivity Marketing. It will feature Barry Parr, Analyst, JupiterResearch, and Rob Crumpler, President and CEO, BuzzLogic. They will be discussion a new BuzzLogic-sponsored research study conducted by JupiterResearch, entitled, “Harnessing the Power of Blogs.”

But, you could also see the power of blogs at virtually ever session at PubCon.

In fact, there were tables in the sessions so the dozens of bloggers who were live blogging the event could blog more comfortably. (I think this is a first: I’m not sure that I’ve ever put bloggers, blogging and blog in the same sentence before.)

And what about Twitter? No, none of the keynote speakers was from free social networking and micro-blogging service. And, no, there were no Twitter tracks. And I can’t even find Twitter mentioned in the title of any of the 85 sessions.

But, trust me, you couldn’t miss the Twitter trend if you’d hit every one of the special events — from the exhibitor cocktail reception sponsored by Bruce Clay and Apogee Search, to the SEOmoz WereWolf Event, to the WebmasterRadio Search Bash, sponsored by Microsoft Live Search.

For example, I was sitting in the session entitled, Five Bloggers and a Microphone - What’s The Worst That Can Happen? It was moderated by Ken Jurina, and the speakers included:
• Andy Beal, Internet Marketing Consultant, Marketing Pilgrim LLC,
• Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing,
• Michael McDonald, Managing Editor, iEntry Inc.,
• Barry Schwartz, President, RustyBrick, Inc.,
• Jane Copland, Search Marketing Consultant, SEOMoz.

When it came time for Q&A, one of the first questions came from a woman in the audience, who said, “I asked my circle of friends on Twitter what I should ask you, and I got eight questions. If I eliminate the seven that are inappropriate, here’s one that the panel can answer….”

That brought down the house.

Oh, PubCon also had lots of tracks and sessions on SEO, SEM and interactive site reviews. But they’ve had those for years. The new news is video, blogs and Twitter. These are the top trends that I spotted at this year’s PubCon.

During Search Engine Strategies San Jose back in August, I did a video interview with Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team. It will be uploaded to the SESConferenceExpo’s Channel on YouTube tomorrow.

Why the wait?

As Maury Sline explained to The Blues Brothers, “A gig like that, you gotta prepare the proper exploitation.”

So, here’s a taste of what you can look forward to seeing and hearing in tomorrow’s video interview: Matt talks about his job interview at Google before he joined the company as a software engineer in January 2000. He takes a look at trends in the industry, including mobile search. He praises an iPhone App developed by Barry Schwartz, President of RustyBrick. And he discusses the Cuttlets, the people who crowd around him at every search conference.

And what can you do today to ensure that you don’t miss the Matt Cutts video interview tomorrow? I’m glad you asked.

First, go to the SESConferenceExpo’s Channel and take a quick look around. You’ll find there are now 184 videos from SES London, SES New York, SES Toronto, and SES San Jose 2008.

According to YouTube Insight, these 184 videos currently have more than 45,000 combined views. That’s about three times more views than the number of people who attended these four conferences and expos this year.

And there will be more video interviews added during and after Search Engine Strategies Chicago, which will be held Dec. 8-12, 2008. That’s a lot of content — and a lot of insights from top search experts and the search engines themselves.

Now, some of these video interviews are uploaded to YouTube during each SES conference. But others are uploaded in the weeks and months following a show.

So, if you want to be alerted when the Matt Cutts video interview has been posted, all you need to do is hit the orange “Subscribe” button in the upper left hand corner of the SESConferenceExpo’s Channel, which already has 142 subscribers.

To embed one of these video interviews, just copy the code from the “Embed” box — which you can find in the “About This Video” box when you’re watching the video. Once you’ve copied the code, just paste it into your website or blog to embed it.

And if you want to embed several of these video interviews, use the Search Engine Strategies video widget. It will let you customize a SES Video Player Widget for the audience on your website or blog.

For example, in the header options, I selected the standard link and said I’m blogging at SES Chicago. For my playlist content, I selected videos of everyone, picked two thumbnails with a maximum of 25 results. And for my format option, I selected a vertical orientation. And the SES Video Player Widget generated the code for me to past into this blog post.

Now, I could have selected a customized header. And after going through an authentication process, I could have customized my playlist — and display only videos of my company. Or I could display videos of everyone, but with videos of my company first. You can see an example of this on the SEO-PR website.

Or, you can see an example of a more bi-partisan approach on the Search Engine Strategies Chicago home page — just below the fold. (By the way, if you register by Friday, Nov. 21, you can save up to $200 with the Early Bird rate.)

Now, I don’t need to explain the benefits of adding video to your blog. Search engine marketers and popular bloggers understand that already. But consider the benefits of adding relevant content from the latest SES conference and expo — quality content that can be customized for your audience. And, don’t take my word for it, check it out for yourself. It is useful content that your website’s visitors will find beneficial or your blog readers will find valuable.

What’s the catch?

Well, if you select videos of everyone, then you might end up with a Matt Cutts video interview on your website or blog. And if anyone watches it, that would give the SESConferenceExpo’s Channel on YouTube more views.

Or, as Elwood told Maury Sline, “I know all about that stuff. I have been exploited all my life.”

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I just received a letter from a writer who said, “Alas, I find myself adrift in a sea of unexplained and/or contradictory publishing terms.” It’s true — you can read three different books on writing…
More: continued here
writing picture books understanding the rules of the game

New market research has found that blog readers are strongly influenced by blog content when it comes to purchase decisions across a number of categories, and that blogs play a key role in ushering readers to the point of an actual purchase. BuzzLogic, a social media analysis company and ad network, sponsored the market research and JupiterResearch, a Forrester research company, conducted the survey of more than 2,000 online consumers in the US.

Their Harnessing the Power of Blogs survey also found that blog readership has grown 300% over the past four years. The results also suggest that consumers who read blogs more than once per month — or frequent blog readers — use blogs as the top online navigation tool to discover other blog content, ranking higher than general Web search or blog search.

The new market research will be the focus of a free webinar, “Consumers and the Influence of Blogs: What it Means for Your Marketing Mix,” which will be held on Thursday, November 20, 2008, at 2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT. The free webinar will be moderated by Matt McGowan, vice president and publisher for Incisive Media’s digital marketing businesses, and will feature Barry Parr, Analyst at JupiterResearch, and Rob Crumpler, President and CEO of BuzzLogic.

Looking more closely at how blogs factor into consumer purchase decisions and the nature of blog influence on buying behavior, the survey found:
• Blogs influence purchases: 50% of blog readers say they find blogs useful for purchase information.
• Blogs sway more purchases among readers than social networks: More frequent blog readers say they trust relevant blog content for purchase decisions than content from social networking sites. Enid Burns of The ClickZ Network focused on this finding in her recent story about the survey, “Study: Blogs Influence Purchases More Than Social Sites.”
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3631303
• Niche focus ups influence factor: For those who have found blog content useful for product decisions, 56% said blogs with a niche focus and topical expertise were key sources.
• Blogs go beyond tech: Outside of technology-related purchases, for which 31% of readers say blogs are useful, other key categories include: media and entertainment (15%); games/toys and/or sporting goods (14%); travel (12%); automotive (11%); and health (10%).

According to the study, blogs factor in to critical stages of the purchase process, weighing most heavily at the actual moment of a purchase decision. When it comes to respondents who said they have trusted blog content for purchase decisions in the past, over half (52 percent) say blogs played a role in the critical moment they decided to move forward with a purchase.

Blog readers were also surveyed about the influence of blogs as it relates to the following steps of the purchase process:
• 21% decide on a product or service,
• 19% refine choices,
• 19% get support and answers,
• 17% discover products and services,
• 14% assure,
• 13% inspire a purchase
• 7% execute a purchase.

For frequent blog readers, ads on blogs are on par with sponsored search results. However, trust of blog advertising exceeds that of social networking site advertising. A quarter of these readers say they trust ads on a blog they read; paid search links also accounted for 25% of the responses, while 19% say they trust ads on social networking sites.

The study also suggests that ads on blogs spur a number of activities: 40% of blog readers have taken action as a result of viewing an ad on a blog; 50% of frequent blog readers say this is the case. The top activities include:
• 17% read product reviews online,
• 16% sought out more info on a product or service,
• 16% visited a manufacturer or retailer website.

JupiterResearch designed and fielded the survey in August 2008 to online consumers selected randomly from the NPD Group US online consumer panel. A total of 2,210 individuals responded. For more information on the survey’s methodology, go to JupiterResearch.

Now, blogs certainly aren’t considered the “newbies” of the social media scene – “granddaddies” is probably a more appropriate term. But that gives them an advantage from a marketing perspective – the medium has matured and moved from early adopter phase to the mainstream.

This may come as a surprise to some search engine marketers, but blog readers do not appear to rely as heavily on search as a means to find new blogs as consumers of traditional online media do. According to the new survey, one in five consumers who have read a blog in the past 12 months — or general blog readers — use blog links to discover new blogs. Further, the study suggests blogs are not consumed in isolation — 49% of blog readers and 71% of frequent readers read more than one blog per session. Other key findings include:
• Links more powerful than search: For frequent readers, links beat search as a navigation tool: 38 percent said blog links were the top tool for discovering new blog content as compared to 34 percent who voted for Web search.
• Links signal trust: For frequent readers, blog links appear to have similar impact as a trusted recommendation from a person (a response from 39 percent of survey participants).
• Blog search not yet mainstream: Blog search engines received the lowest ranking from respondents: 6 percent of general readers and 11 percent of frequent readers say they use these tools to discover new blogs.

If you are interested in getting more details about Harnessing the Power of Blogs, register for the free Webinar. Again, it will be held on Thursday, November 20, 2008, at 2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT.