Build a funnel to attract and feed new customers. Add social media to the mix. And, use freebie tools freely. These words of advice come from Pam Baker's look at customer relationship tools. Baker provides examples of other uses for CRM, pointing to Drugstore.com's recent repurposing of its RightNow chat feature that serves as an educational tool for subsidiary Beauty.com. The online destination recreated the brick-and-mortar beauty counter experience, where cosmetics experts address problems and recommend products to solve them, she writes. Customers also get a free gift with purchase.

Net neutrality can greatly affect SEM, but the topic is nearly overlooked by the industry, Cindy Krum tells WebProNews's Abby Johnson in a video interview. For starters, content throttled by broadband providers as consumers download videos, music and more will drive up costs for PPC campaigns, and rankings down, according to Johnson.Also, if your content is throttled, the load time will be slow. "If net neutrality is not preserved, sites that we use and depend on everyday such as... Facebook would not be here," she writes. "If you remember, the Federal Communications Commission recently cracked down on Comcast …

Search marketers will have to create better SEO strategies as engines move toward returning a variety of content--video, images, news, blogs--in each query result. Mike Grehan contemplates the type of information search engines will need to provide people more targeted results, banters some ideas around based on Google's new Chrome browser, and imagines the type of search data engines will accrue about consumers in 2009 and beyond. "We all tend to look at search engines as though they are a black box--they have mysterious technology that nobody seems to know a great deal about," he writes. "And yet, …

Peter Da Vanzo looks at how small and medium-sized businesses can generate quality links with little time and money because you can never know too much about remaining agile -- and becoming a trusted colleague and advisor, so people come to you for advice. If your potential audience hangs out on forums, then that's where you hang. Be edgy. "Big business finds it very difficult to be controversial, yet controversy can be a great marketing tool," Da Vanzo writes. "The Sex Pistols built a career, not by copying the establishment, but by butting heads with it."

If you are looking for one place to find information on many SEO keyword research tools, Ann Smarty has compiled a list in her latest post. The list starts with free reference sources and dictionaries, and moves to options for checking out keyword and anchor text competitors use. Smarty also includes links to keyword suggestion tool and keyword brainstorming tools, among others.

How do you translate a Web site from English into Spanish, Chinese, French, Italian or any other language and ensure it remains search engine optimized? Computer-aided translation tools help manage the process with few worries about translating code and metadata, but ensuring the words match the meaning is a whole other animal, explains Bryan Montpetit. Montpetit suggests language experts work closely with SEO specialists familiar with the nuances of translating languages. And since SEO projects don't always convert well from English into other languages, he provides tips that ensure all JavaScript files and code strings translate properly.

Finding referrals after the first page of search results has become a little easier through Google Analytics. Will Critchlow relies on the tool to gain insight into increasing traffic for Web sites, rather than help from third-party tools or log file analysis. Tapping the data for SEO projects, Critchlow steps through the process to create new profiles. He explains how to use a reporting feature that lets you break down data and referring keywords that come from specific pages in search results. You will need a Google Analytics feature called "segments," he writes, but once it's good to …

A little SEO humor goes along way. In the comic strip Ranked Hard, Shell Harris shares a "search engine friendly" birthday card he received last year. The card reads: "It's your birthday! Happy Birthday. When was your last Birthday? I hope you have fun on your birthday. You should get lots of gifts on your birthday. ... "

It's important to test target segments and landing pages in Facebook Ads and Facebook Social Ads before you jump into any ad project on Facebook, suggest Manny Marrero. In the post, Marrero serves up a long list of dos and don'ts to help you get started and provides definitions of key terms and examples of ads Marrero also details how to bid, budget, analyze and optimize campaigns, along with insight on Facebook's options to target specific demographics by state, city, gender, age, keywords, workplaces, relationship and sexual persuasion. "According to Facebook, there are 33,849,820 targetable persons in its network. …

Google Trends for Websites, Google Media Planner and Google Insights for Search are three tools you should know if budgets are tight and you need advanced competitive tools to prove the effectiveness of online campaigns. Michael McVeigh defines each Google tool and provides insights into using them. Released this summer, for example, Google Insights for Search allows you to compare consumer interest in your brand with a competitor's. The tool lets you filter the data by region and industry, so it would compare consumer interest in Marriot hotels vs. Hilton, for example, in the Northeast vs. the Southwest, …