The monkey is about to run wild, as Yahoo has issued a limited release of Search Monkey, a tool that allows site owners to customize the way their organic search listings appear. Users can add details like an infobar (a graphic with drop-down menus for more information), or reviews, a logo and other features to their listing. The goal is to create a search listing that better reflects the company's culture and entices users to click. Interested site owners can sign up to be part of the trial run, or wait until Search Monkey's official launch in mid-May. …

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 …

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 …

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. …

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 …

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 …

Danny Sullivan is a firm believer that one month's search market share report from one vendor does not guarantee an accurate view of the "state of the search market." Examining the engine's performance across measurement firms over time provides a more holistic view, he says, and does so in this post. The charts provided offer a view of the Big Three from June 2007 through March 2008 for both market share and search volume, using stats from comScore, Nielsen, Hitwise and even Compete. And while some trends (i.e. Google retaining its search market dominance) were obvious, what became …

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 …

"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 …

"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 …