Ted Ives believes the separation of paid search and organic search can be harmful to a company's efforts. He points to overlaps in the two fields to help marketers understand how one can leverage key findings from the other. He lays out a list of differences and commonalities and describes the principles behind quality scores to reveal the similarities to click-through rates. 

Tools to help marketers discover new keywords and phrases for Web site campaigns will become more important as the Web becomes more crowded and competition in specific markets increases. To help marketers get a grip on keyword research, Kristi Hines serves up a list of 40 posts that ran in 2011 on keyword research tools. This list provides a guide to even more keyword research tools, strategies, and optimization. It contains posts from a variety of sources, such as Search Engine People, Weblogbetter, and Niche Pursuits.

Kevin Gibbons serves up 154 tips, tricks, Twitter tweets and takeaways after attending Pubcon 2011. Most of the Twitter tweets provide a quick reflection on something said during a conference session, which almost makes them read like a Haiku. The list includes general SEO trends, on-site optimization, technical tips, SEO strategies, insights into webmaster tools and algorithms, Google Panda update and SSL, link-building, keyword research, social and local search, and analytics.

Tim Kimber tells us how to download the Bing bar for a chance to win an Xbox 360, Kinect for Xbox 360 and five games. He provides a link to submit name and email address. The Bing bar, which launched in February, allows users to check Facebook streams, emails, weather, traffic, and news. 

Mike King explains, using social media tools and industry stats from companies such as comScore and Compete, how to build links. He starts by describing how to mine the data and create four groups considered "personas," also known as audience segments. The example describes a campaign for a guitar company. The groups include Music Moms, Happy Hobbyists, Raging Rock Stars, and Involved Instructors. Keywords for each should represent characteristics of the groups. King takes us through each process, and provides detailed examples and plenty of tips on developing scalable link-building campaigns.

Rand Fishkin writes that it appears that Google's Matt Cutts was either misinformed or gave misleading information about referral data, because "(not provided)" became a referrer for many Web sites in November, climbing into the double digits. It continues to rise by more than 20% -- a big problem, according to Fishkin. So he began running a survey last week asking search marketers to provide input on the impact. He provides a visual of analytics data from the 60 sites showing the self-reported percent of their Google search traffic using keywords "(not provided)."

Kevin Gibbons provides insight on optimizing WordPress sites so they have the best chance of appearing at the top of search results. He tells us that while the process is similar to optimizing any Web site, a WordPress installation allows marketers to customize many page elements, as well as automating them to cut down on the time it takes to post a new item to the site.

Derek Edmond serves up nine key points in the wake of Google's enhancements to signed-in search data, and what and when the engine will share it. About a month ago Google made an announcement that it had increased the services' use of …

Sam Diaz reminds us not to forget about the power of open-Web search when it comes to a tool offered in Google+, the search engine's social network. Unlike Facebook, which Bing supports, Google+ offers its own engine to search the open Web and index the business pages directly in the query results of the top engine with about 65% of market share. Google allows searchers to find the brand in Google+ by typing in the plus signal and the company name through a tool called Direct Connect. Search remains an important tool for marketers, but consider the many other Google products that …

Bing Webmaster Tools now post alerts to sites flagged with possible malware. The tools now sends email alerts when the Bing team flags a URL on a Web site infected with malware, giving marketers a chance to clean up the dirt as quickly as possible. In some instances the malware belongs to a partner Web site, such as an ad network. Duane Forrester tells us how Bing makes this distinction, and provides directions for setting up email alerts and gaining back trust to rerank in the search engine results pages.