In addition to today’s Internet Marketing Monitor coverage, we felt these stories were worth pulling out of the multitude of news items for July 5, 2007:

SMX Notes - Give It Up! [Marketing Pilgrim]

I thought it was a little strange when I found out that a certain segment of the SMX Advanced conference had been “censored” for a month - in that attendees were barred from writing about or disclosing what was discussed for 30 days. Now that the month has expired, Marketing Pilgrim has posted notes from the session. In it, search engine experts divulge a few of their “secrets” and SEO tips. There’s nothing really revolutionary or Earth-shattering here. But there’s also more than a few good tips and you’re almost guaranteed to learn something that you didn’t know (or hadn’t thought of yet).

New click quality reports in adCenter [adCenter Blog]

Microsoft has added new reports to adCenter that show advertisers which clicks have been deemed “standard quality” and which have been labeled “low quality”. Why do you care about that label? Because low quality clicks are the ones adCenter won’t charge you for. The post lists several factors that could lead to a click being given a “low quality” score. I like calling these types of clicks “low quality” as opposed to “invalid” because, as the post points out, they can still lead to conversions. It’s not likely… but it’s still possible. (Via Search Engine Watch)

Crowd’s wisdom help South Korea search engine beat Google and Yahoo [International Herald Tribune]

Sometimes those of us in the West seem blinded by the big four search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN/Live, and Ask.com. It’s easy to forget that elsewhere in the world things are different. In South Korea, for example, Google doesn’t control anywhere near the 70% of Internet searches that some research firms claim it owns here in the States. In South Korea - one of the most Internet-savvy nations in the world - Google doesn’t even get 2% of the country’s search traffic. Using a combination of Q&A style content generation and Korean-specific indexing, a search engine called Naver rules with more than 77% of the country’s search traffic. It’s popularity has made the company behind Naver the most profitable Internet firm in the country. This just goes to show that what works in one locale won’t work everywhere. It also helps to put the whole “Google world domination” theory into perspective. Big G has a way to go before it can even pass Yahoo! (which handles a little over 4% of the search traffic in South Korea), let alone Naver. (Via Search Engine Land)

Have a great night, folks!