Joshua Greenbaum digs into a new product coming out of Microsoft aimed at helping advertisers determine the ROI of all of their search campaigns, and explains how it might be the software giant's most powerful assault on Google thus far. "Here's what Microsoft and its CRM team are up to," Greenbaum says. "Coming to CRM Online this fall--and for the low, low price of 'free,' no less--is a new feature that lets Microsoft CRM customers track the success of their search word-based web marketing campaigns. The concept is simple: capture the leads as generated by your favorite search …

Jeff Muendel reviews Wordpot.com, a keyword research tool that's nestled squarely between freebies like Google Suggest and pay-to-play tools like Wordtracker and KeywordDiscovery. According to the company, Wordpot.com is designed specifically to find niche keywords for AdWords optimization. It works like most other tools, pulling results from multiple search engines, and offers daily and monthly reporting. Users can also refine keyword searches by match type, and once you register, you can export your lists to an Excel or text file. "Wordpot claims to have much more on the horizon, and perhaps that means they will eventually …

There's black hat SEO and white hat SEO, but as Stephen Shankland notes, there's a huge swath of gray in-between that can snag you (or your client) either stellar results or severe search engine penalties, or some random combination of the two. "Earlier this year, Matthew Inman had achieved the notable distinction of vaulting a Web site called JustSayHi high into the results for a search on 'online dating,'" Shankman says. "But after he expanded his effort to new areas, Google obliterated the site from its search results. Inman had used an aggressive technique called widget bait …

Good content is the "manna" of SEO--but how do you bake up that life-giving, nutritious bread to draw readers in? Lisa Barone offers some examples of good content for the readers tired of more vague descriptions. So instead of saying "write interesting copy," she says "write something no one else has," and offers an example of just that. Comb through competitors' (and colleagues') sites to find angles that they haven't covered, products that they haven't reviewed or problems that they haven't been able to solve, and you have fodder for your next blog post or product page. …

Google AdWords released a new Geographic Performance Report last week, and David Rodnitsky explains why the data is about to (or should be about to) become your best friend--particularly if you're currently using Conversion Tracker as well. "Geographic performance will show you--down to the suburb if you want it to--the relative performance of different geographic regions," he says. Rodnitsky used the report for an Arizona-based client that was buying keywords on a national level and adding their city/region name to narrow the focus. Analysis of the geographic performance reports found that the keyword was performing well in …

"As you may have noticed, the search engine results pages on Google's geo-targeted search services frequently display different rankings than those you experience on Google.com," Aaron Wall says. "In order to make search results more relevant to local audiences, Google uses different sorting methodologies than those used on Google.com." And Wall offers tips for optimizing your copy, domain and overall strategy for regional searchers. First, decide whether you need a local domain extension for your top-level domain (TLD). "There are exceptions, but the local TLD tends to trump .com when it comes to local result sets," Wall says. …

Shimon Sandler takes readers through optimizing a pre-existing (and likely underperforming) AdWords campaign step-by-step, starting with downloading the Keyword report for a previous time period. Sort the data by your chosen success metric (cost-per-conversion, CTR, etc) and then port it to a new Excel spreadsheet. Now comes the keyword-based trimming. "Only use the keywords that converted from the previous time period," Sandler says. "This is effectively cutting away all the excessive 'no results' keyword spending." Bundle the keywords into ad groups, craft fresh copy for each--with two ads per group so that you can split a/b test. One …

On the hunt for a bike on Craigslist? Or maybe it's new blog posts related to your hotelier client? Whatever the info, Yotify can scour the Web for you and report back on any new info, sort of like Google Alerts on steroids. "Create a 'Scout' keyed to Craigslist, YouTube, Hotels.com, shopping sites like eBay, blogs, or mainstream media," Rafi says. "When your information is found, the Scout reports back to you as often or periodical[ly] as you'd like, hourly or daily." You can program scouts to simply search for keywords, or get complex and base one on …