Microsoft's recently published "Bing: New Features Relevant to Webmasters" guide describes the primary difference of Bing vs. Live Search that impact site owners. Among the features, it clarifies more than 300 facts used to determine categories, document previews and the concept of "best match." Bing can also do limited data extraction for Flash-based sites that are responsible for 21% of all empty descriptions in their index. The white paper covers the use (or rather omission for Microsoft) of microformats, instant answers, local listings and searcher behavior. Fox writes that Microsoft provides data about search behavior based on …

Have you ever wanted to know the keywords competitors use? Amber points to a statistic analysis tool from Compete.com; the free version of the service provides information to improve your PPC campaigns by giving you analysis of competitors. Information found on the site includes monthly normalized unique visitor stats for each URL entered, the monthly percentage change of unique visitors, yearly change, top referring sites, top destination sites, and when available, top tags. Amber cautions not to include the "http://www." in the "compare options" query boxes when entering in the information. Just enter the company name.

Google Analytics now allows you to import Google Analytics Goals and Transactions into your AdWords account to use as conversion actions. This lets you track the return on investment from AdWords campaigns inside the AdWords interface, according to Emel Mutlu. It also lets you use them with the AdWords CPA bidding tool designed to make it easier to manage the process. Mutlu explains how to import Google Analytics Goals and Transactions into AdWords. Begin the four-step process with signing up for an account. Once the account is active you can enable sharing and set up a goal to …

Automated tools to manage and generate paid search ads and keywords are helpful, but don't rely solely on machines to do all the work. Jessica Hullman explains there are pros and cons to both human and automated paid search methods. Before you go "firing the humans and automating" big accounts, there are a few "constraints" SEO professionals should consider, Hullman writes. For instance, knowing enough about the tools can help you sidestep mishaps, such as advertising on the phrase "black leather belt" that the automated tool might recommend, when you actually sell "black belt six sigma." Of course, …

Quality SEO skills are undervalued. That's according to David Dalka, who writes that companies still don't understand the correct way to find qualified SEO experts. Many look for low-cost resources when they should focus more on perfecting success measurements, and integrating SEO campaigns into other marketing strategies. Dalka looks at reasons why SEO might be misunderstood by many management teams, which often leads to a lack of financial resources and support. He writes that budgets are typically controlled by "individuals without a deep knowledge of search engine marketing," so it's important to start by creating a short prospect …

Search traffic, matching algorithms and changing needs of the competition can make the paid search bidding process volatile, especially when you're trying to understand the best keywords to use for each season. Siddharth Shah suggests building predictive keyword models that estimate revenue and spend patterns. While it's time-consuming and cost-prohibitive to manually sift through historic keyword data for each season, at least find a semi-automated process to identify the information -- critical to a campaign's success, he writes. Listing three steps to cover the basics, Shah says to combine seasonal keywords in campaigns, make sure each reflects the …

Online gaming paid search ads have been banned for several years, but if they were approved -- as part of a general easing of legislation over online gambling -- it could bring in millions of dollars to search engines in paid search campaigns, according to WebProNews. To determine just how much revenue search engines lose, the writer created a list of 200 keywords consisting of obvious choices for online gaming companies vying for attention of searchers. He assumed how much paid clicks would deliver, and factored in comScore's latest findings on search market share for the top engines.

Google's Matt Cutts earlier this month rattled cages in the SEO community by saying site owners could no longer perform "PageRank sculpting" using the nofollow tag in the way they'd previously thought. Danny Sullivan tries to calm nerves by pointing out the change simply means regular links no longer get to cash in on extra PageRank. It doesn't mean that they get penalized. Sullivan suggests SEO experts stop worrying about PageRank and sculpting because there are far more useful things that can bring about changes, such as fixing bad page titles, obtaining quality external links, creating quality …

Google penalizes sites for comment spam links to bad neighborhoods, but lifts the penalty once comments get cleaned, according to Richard Baxter, who wrote a case study on his own experience to share with the SEO community. While he was away, traffic dropped on Baxter's site. So he drilled down into Google Analytics to find the reasons why. Drilling down to the keyword level, he found the culprit: comment spam missed by Akismet, which typically filters out the bad stuff.

Avinash Kaushik shares five "cool, 'non-normal,' analyses" you can apply to gain a better understanding of paid search performance. For instance, Kaushik suggests that while many people focus on keywords, not enough attention is being paid to the role match types play in determining the search queries. These are the words the person actually types that triggers paid search ad to appear in the listing. Analytics platforms, similar to ClickEquations, can help you analyze the impact these different match types have on performance.