SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 6, 2011

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land:

• Marketing solutions at Search Engine Land

  Understand Your Web Visitors Without Using Cookies Multi-site Management: Challenges and Solutions Holistic Marketing: Fitting All the Pieces Together What’s the Secret to Video SEO? Read these and more in the e-Solution Spotlights pages at Search Engine Land
• Steve Jobs Searches Spiked At Google

  It’s as you would have expected — searches for Steve Jobs skyrocketed at Google, after news of his death spread. Oddly, Google Trends — which shows spiking search queries — failed to show this activity until hours later. Google, Yahoo Didn’t Show Spike Yesterday, I had some people ask me why Steve Jobs wasn’t showing […]

• The Clickthrough Rate Equation In Organic Search

  When I was in middle school, my favorite book and my favorite TV show were both Cosmos by Carl Sagan. I must have read the book at least 10 times, and I watched the series every time it was on the local PBS station. One of the most interesting parts of Cosmos that has stuck […]

• Google Enables Call Tracking From Mobile Landing Pages

  Google’s Click to Call program has been a huge success. About a year ago Google reported that it had 500,000 advertisers using Click to Call. (That number was repeated again today in a blog post.) And last year former Google Product SVP Jonathan Rosenberg said “Click-to-Call ads are generating millions of calls every month.” Calls […]

• Schmidt: Hard To Beat Facebook, If Playing Exactly The Same Game

  Can Google beat Facebook in social media? Not unless Google changes the game, says Google chairman Eric Schmidt. Schmidt’s comments on Facebook, search rankings and a possible joke about a teenager civil rights act to protect them from social media discrimination came during an interview this week with PBS correspondent Gwen Ifill. Change The Social […]

• Oh No! What Happened To My PageRank?

  There has been a lot of discussion and scare on Twitter and within the SEO forums that Google has disabled the Toolbar PageRank scores from working. The truth is, no they have not. As several sites have reported already, PageRank is still alive in the Toolbar but Google changed the lookup URL. This change has […]

• Two Ways To Drive More Holiday Traffic & Conversions

  Two ways brick ‘n mortar retailers can increase consumer engagement and conversions in time for the holidays are: (1) build a simple and robust mobile store locator, and (2) provide maximum coverage of the brand’s digital storefront in all the cities and neighborhoods for each location. Research by Brand Anywhere and Luth Research found retailers […]

• Alternatives To Siri: Google Voice Actions, Nuance, Vlingo

  Beyond some of the processing and other technical upgrades in the new iPhone 4S, the standout feature of the new device is the Siri “Assistant.” It’s an expanded and enhanced version of what’s behind the existing Siri iPhone app, which is being shut down on October 15. And while Siri is not a “voice search […]

• Apple’s Steve Jobs Has Died

  Apple cofounder, chairman and former CEO Steve Jobs has died today at age 56. Apple’s board issued the following statement about his death: We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today. Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Facebook launches new inline translation service, The Sociable

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Map Maker Graduation Part V: from Afghanistan to Antarctica, Google LatLong

Paid Search & Contextual

• Google Remarketing: A One-To-One Conversation, Alan Rothstein
• Two more reporting enhancements to help you deep dive into your AdSense earnings, Inside AdSense

Searching

• Google eBooks travels ‘across the pond’, Inside Google Books

SEM Industry

• Google Revamps Web Search Help Design, Search Engine Roundtable
• Your client is wrong. Now what?, SEO Copywriting

SEO & SEM

• 3 Hotel SEO Tips from the Trenches, Daily SEO Tip
• 3 Ways of Testing SEO With PPC, Certified Knowledge
• AdWords Testing New Location Targeting Tool, AdWords Help Experts
• Beginners Guide: Doing a Site Audit Using Google Webmaster Tools, distilled.net
• Eye-Tracking Google SERPs – 5 Tales of Pizza, SEOmoz
• Google AdWords: "Your Ads Are Now Running" Bug, Search Engine Roundtable
• Has Google disabled Pagerank.. NO, David Naylor
• He Said, She Said: Avoiding the SEO Cowboys [How To Choose An SEO Company], Search Engine People
• Keyword Research: Dealing With Uncertainty, Search Engine Watch
• SEO Definitions: Gaining a Deeper Understanding of SEO Terminology, level343.com
• What’s the most important quality to look for in a Search Marketer?, Site Visibility

Social Media

• Google+1 Goes Critical, But Not In A Good Way, MediaPost
• Latin America Increasingly Choosing Facebook for Social Networking, eMarketer
• New Company Updates: Learn more about the Companies you follow on LinkedIn, The LinkedIn Blog

Video, Music & Image Search

• Flickr app 2.0 for Windows Phone, Flickr Blog

Recent Hot Items From Sphinn, Our Social News Sharing Site:

• How to stop Facebook, Google+, and Twitter from tracking you – Those of us who know how the Web works know that every time you visit a page with a Facebook, Google+, or Twitter link, the code behind that link actually comes from Facebook or Twitter servers, so if you're surfing to that page with the same browser that you're currently logged into Facebook or Twitter with, then they know you're on that site. They know how long you spent on that site, how often you visit, and so forth. It's all very simple to do. Yet most people are cheerfully oblivious to this fact.
• 5 Ways Schema.org Borks the Internet – Many see Schema.org as the next big thing and are scrambling to implement as quickly as possible. But is it really all that and a bag of chips?
• Improve The User Experience By Tracking Errors – It’s easy to see your top-visited pages, navigation patterns and conversion metrics using visitor-tracking tools like Google Analytics. However, this data doesn’t show the roadblocks that users typically run into on your website. Tracking and optimizing error messages will help you measurably improve your website’s user experience. We’ll walk through how to add error tracking using Google Analytics, with some code snippets. Then, we’ll assemble the data and analyze it to figure out how to improve your error message drop rates.
• Facebook Page Analytics Updated with Conversation Metrics & API – Facebook has just revealed new tools to help companies, large and small, connect with their target market and better measure the conversations happening around their brand.
  Page Insights now includes a “People Talking About This” metric, displayed beneath the “Likes” on every page, to show conversations about the brand’s Page. Facebook has also announced a Page Insights API