Mike Parker interviews Diana Russell, a former real estate agent/mortgage broker who was struggling with her Web site (among other things) in the midst of the tanking mortgage market. Russell was using Compass Internet Systems' CompassSearch platform, and while it had been great at gaining visibility for her site, she hadn't seen much in the way of leads. Instead of just letting Russell cancel her subscription, Compass chose to do some pro-bono lead-generation work--and the results were stellar. In about a month leads, escrows and sales started appearing on her computer screen. "I went from having …

Yahoo who? In the midst of all the acquisition chatter, Microsoft's Live Search team continues to innovate. Greg Sterling gives a quick wrap-up of the recent Live Search changes (complete with links to the appropriate MSN Blogs). First up is an update to frequency and speed of the MSNBot. Faster and more frequent crawling means that Live Search will be better at finding fresh content for searchers. The bot is also reminding Webmasters to keep their robots.txt files updated. Meanwhile, Live Search is rolling out more detailed links for large Web sites (a la sitelinks). Called …

So you've succeeded in getting your client to blog. And now page views and comments are up, the content is having a great impact on overall SEO--but the client wants to know how the blog can actually impact sales. Jennifer Osborne has been in the same situation, and she offers some tips for converting those readers into buyers. The blog has to represent a company's authority or industry expertise if readers are going to trust it enough to pull out their credit cards. "Use your blog to develop a specialty in a particular niche of your industry," Osborne says. …

Google made its Website Optimizer tool free for anyone who wants to run conversion, design and multivariate tests on their landing pages, and some in the search community have voiced concerns about whether it will slim the pickings for search firms. If clients can run their own tests, will they pull back from search budgets? Perhaps rely a little less on their agency for other things as well? Resolution Media's Jeff Campbell says no. Google Website Optimizer is a tool--nothing more, nothing less, Campbell argues, and a tool in the absence of strategic thinking is worthless. "Prior to …

While most advertisers have jumped on the social media bandwagon, others--particularly those in the less-sexy verticals--may not be convinced that Facebook, Digg or even a blog can be a viable marketing channel for them. John Ellis uses a fly-fishing instructor as an example of how social media can work for any company. First, set up a blog that doles out fly-fishing advice. "As an instructional blog, it has a clear focus," Ellis says. "Creating a clear, precise blog is a great way to target customers. Remember it's not the quantity of visitors you want, it's the quality. Five …

Yahoo has rolled out a Click Filter Report, or a detailed record of the fraudulent or erroneous clicks they don't charge advertisers for. In the interest of transparency (and likely a result of the Web giant's recent partnership with Click Forensics), the new report will be accessible under the "Traffic Quality Reports" tab in a user's YSM account. Advertisers can use the report to compare Yahoo's click records to their own (or third-party) traffic logs and check for any discrepancies. The data is available by campaign, by distribution tactic, or from multiple accounts simultaneously. YSM account holders can …

"Every analytic solution can generate a perfect storm of data that obliterates the horizon in innumerable details." So says Charles Thrasher, media specialist and project lead for adCenter. And he offers a thorough overview of how to best determine which metrics should be used as key performance indicators (KPIs) for your Web site. Thrasher borrows from the Jason Burby and Shane Atchinson's book "Actionable Web Analytics" to suggest some KPIs for a commercial site--metrics that are typically tied to revenue. Think about using stats like overall conversion rate, average order size and the Web site's effect on offline …

"The overarching theme to AltSearchEngines Day is to encourage the alts to band together and help each other reach the mainstream audience," says Richard MacManus, describing Alternative Search Engines Day, a San Francisco-based event focused on fostering (and funding) innovation in the search space. Charles Knight, blogger behind AltSearchEngines.com, is leading the initiative to gain more visibility for alternative search engines (which include mobile, health and multimedia search platforms) by encouraging their founders and technologists to work together. One strategy for increasing overall market share discussed was the idea of "federated search"--like the dashboard provided by …

Amy Booth digs into the political sentiments of search engine employees, culling data from the Federal Election Commission (via Chicagotribune.com) to see which Presidential candidate drummed up the most fiscal support. Microsoft employees spent more than $212,000 on contributions to Presidential candidates last year, with the bulk of those donations going to Hillary Clinton. With over $201,000, Google workers spent slightly less, but the bulk of their contributions went to Barack Obama's campaign. Meanwhile, Yahoos gave just about $50,000 to the candidates overall, with over half of those funds headed toward Obama. "And although Microsoft, Google …