Determining the online channels that contribute best to sales requires having the tools to analyze attribution, according to Adam Sutton. He talks with a marketing vice president at a home improvement retailer who believes many marketers miss the mark when it comes to channel attribution. From the discussion, Sutton share the insights on why this happens, and what marketers can do to make sure they count the revenue contributions made by all channels.

Marty Weintraub tells us why search won't die. He explains how social will become search. And, he finds that correlation between the online and the offline world. Drive-by billboards don't reach out to ask consumers their interests. And, contextual marketplaces will probably never match search in how users divulge hard-core intent with near-complete specificity, he writes.

Customers spend tons of time trying to tell marketers what they want by clicking on some Web site links and not others. Crispin Sheridan tells us site search can become a sensitive barometer that reveals the ways customers view your products and services. So, he provides a few tips on how to identify trends based on keywords and searches,and tells us why it's important to not only look for keywords you're not bidding on, but for keywords now active that no one searched on just a few months ago.

Patrick Altoft analyzes data to determine what percentage of traffic the top spot in organic search rankings gets versus the second, third and others. He got help understanding the position and percentage from click data in Google Webmaster Tools and a new study from the Chitika ad network. Altoft explains he set out to determine the percentages because ever since the AOL data leak in 2006, people have quoted the same numbers. It was time to take another look at the share rankings get.

Matt McGee tells us why getting local search techniques down is more difficult than most think. He begins with describing the importance of small businesses claiming their listing in Google Maps and the nuances that make the listing informative to people searching the Web. For example, it's important to make sure the business is listed in the proper category. He also discusses generic keywords in the business name and how to build a series of reviews.

Linkscape's index updated on May 27, with fresh data crawled during the past 30 days. Rand Fishkin draws out some whiteboard diagrams of how SEOmoz makes Linkscape updates happen. He explains the importance of the data and walks through how the information gets indexed, calculated, sorted, and more.

Don't trust link buying to one broker, and be careful with whom you share link-building purchase data. Aaron Wall provides these warnings specifically for small SEO firms that may become more vulnerable than larger companies. Wall believes the smaller companies need to do a better job of protecting their assets against thieves who may want to "clone" their ideas. So he provides some suggestions and an example of a friend who went head to head with some shady characters.

Rather than spending hundreds of dollars monthly, you can build a base of quality links from the ground up, according to Jennifer Van Iderstyne. In the detailed post, Van Iderstyne explains the gritty work required to get the job done correctly -- such as defining a "great" site, and making contacts to get those links.

If you were to compare SEO to a sport, which would you pick and why? asks Lee Odden. In an interview with Monster.com's Matt Evans we not only discover why SEO is like rugby, but also the difference between working as an SEO expert in an agency verses in-house for a company, tips on reporting performance, and the future of code level SEO, structured data and sitemaps versus page content and social media.