comScore’s May 2011 U.S. search engine rankings shows no real change in the market shares of the major search engines.

Google retained its market share leadership with a 65.5 percent market share (up 0.1 percentage points), followed by Yahoo! with 15.9 percent and Microsoft/Bing with 14.1 percent. Ask Network accounted for 2.9 percent, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.5 percent.

So how DO you get your site to the top spot of the first page of Google, Bing and the other search engines? What are the most important factors for getting a high search engine ranking? What should you spend most of your search engine optimization (SEO) time and budget on in order to increase your organic search engine rankings?

These and similar questions are likely to occupy much of your time and attention as an Internet marketer or search engine marketer. Especially as Google, Bing and the other search engines do their best to maintain the secrecy of their search engine algorithms.

According to eMarketer, Internet marketers are set to spend more money on online display advertising than search marketing by 2015.

While search advertising attracts the most online ad dollars right now, the steep growth in online video ad spending, combined with steady increases in banner advertising, mean that display advertising will usurp search within the next four years.

Want to know who’s linking to you – or to a competitor’s website – and be able to filter the results according to your own key criteria? Well, here are seven (7) free backlink analysis tools to help you do just that…

About 1 in 10 clicks on paid search advertisements come from mobile devices, according to March 2011 research from Performics.

Performics found that while about 10 percent of online search ads were displayed on mobile devices in March, they also got 9.8 percent of all clicks during the same period.

Two recent studies indicate that around 75 percent of online retailers based in the United States are deploying video on their websites.

Firstly, the e-tailing group’s ’13th Annual Mystery Shopping Study’ reveals that nearly 75 percent s of U.S. online retailers had video on their websites in the fourth quarter of 2010 (up from 55 percent a year early).

An often cited way of generating traffic is to leave comments on blogs and forums along with a link to your website. Write a relevant and well written comment and this could bring visitors to your site.

Even better, if the link is ‘do follow’ the major search engines such as Google and Bing may recognize the link as a ‘vote of confidence’ in your site, thereby helping your site rank higher in the search engines.

Google appears to have removed the cost-per-click estimates from its publicly available Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Either that or a temporary software glitch is hiding the CPC data for now.

Unless the removal of the cost-per-click (CPC) data is temporary, prospective advertisers and others will no longer be able to get CPC estimates of running text or banner ads in Google’s search engine and/or Google Adsense advertising network without having (and logging into) a Google advertising account.

Research from Optify shows that, on average, the top result on Google attracts more than 36 percent of clicks for a given search term or phrase.

Optify’s study finds that websites ranked number one have an average click-through rate (CTR) of 36.4 percent, with the second ranked result having a 12.5 percent CTR and the third result having a 9.5 percent CTR.

Want to know what keywords your competitors are targeting for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes? Apogee Consulting’s free keyword research tool helps you do just that.

Just type in your competitor’s URL and the free keyword tool will generate a list of keywords your competitor has included in their meta tags. It also provides links to free versions of the WordTracker and Keyword Discovery keyword tools so you can see how many searches these keywords get on the search engines.