This Week in Search: September 30

Another week of search headlines including some new features for Google Analytics, Patents on SEO (Its true… I promise), and some social media news. Google had a good week considering, they were in the headlines last week for all the wrong reasons. (Cough, Senate hearing, Cough) So lets get right to “This week in Search”.

Business Wire claims Patent for Press Release SEO

Press Releases have typically been used as an SEO tactic to gain more search traffic and a valuable inbound link. However this week, Business Wire has claimed a patent on “Press Release SEO”.

“Business Wire announced on Wednesday that it has been awarded a U.S. Patent for the technological process of optimizing and distributing press releases to maximize their ability to be found and tracked in leading search engines.”

Quite an interesting turn in the serach industry. Time will tell if this sets a precedent for other search tactics to be patented.

Google Analytics Launches Real Time Data

Google Analytics made a huge spash in the search world today with an annoucement of improved features and more options for its users. The biggest is that Google Analytics will now provide real time site stats. This is a big feature addition to Google Analytics which strengthens their position as one of the better analytics tool on the market. Real time measuring can be used to assess social media impact and campaign impact instantly. This is a huge feature announcement for GA.

How Will Facebook’s New Features Affect Brand Pages?

Last week Facebook introduced the new Timeline feature for profiles. Mashable took an in-depth look at how it would affect brand pages with the new layout. The new layout not only makes the users profile look great but really gives brand pages a personality. Timeline is meant to tell a story and brands will be able to tell their story and build a persona through the new timeline feature. Mashable also has some expamples that are worth taking a look at.

Search Advertising Revenues hit 7.3B

Yes this stat is for the US, but still! Search advertising revnues hit 7.3 BILLION for the first half of 2011. Which is amazing and showing how much search is still growing. In Canada, the number is much smaller but it is still growing at an amazing pace. Compare that to last years number of 5.7B in the first 6 months of 2010. Go Search industry!

Google+ Hits 50 Million Users

Cheers to Google+ for hitting 50 million users! Google+ opened to the public last week and for each day since, Google+ has been adding about 2 million new users. Google+ is also the fastest social network to get to 50 million users and they did this in the same week Facebook hosted F8 to launch their new features. This battle is heating up.