SearchCap: The Day In Search, June 22, 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:

• How To Use Occupational Targeting In Facebook For B2B Leads & Sales

  For many B2B marketers, mainstream social channels a la Facebook (FB) and LinkedIn remain the proverbial Wild West of the contextual online advertising realm. While some early-adopters look to these platforms with intrigue and enthusiasm, others are handicapped by intimidation— skeptical of how rich and sophisticated these social landscapes might be. Between the two channels, […]

• Why Search Marketers Are The Future Media Planners

  Chalk and cheese? Oil and water? Facebook users and MySpace users? Just how different are search marketers and display advertisers? Just three years ago, these two groups of people would be completely segmented, often sitting at opposite ends of an agency office, rarely collaborating on projects and with a slight dislike of each other. Their […]

• Google — With Help From YouTube — Hits One Billion Visitors Before Facebook

  We continue to hear about Facebook’s 700 million users, on the way to a billion worldwide. According to comScore Google is already there, at least looking across all its websites. Google: The Biggest Network Of Sites The chart below, provided to us from comScore, shows the number of unique visitors that went to each company’s […]

• Report: Only 3% to 7.5% of Fans View Posts From A Facebook Page

  Recent findings from PageLever revealed the reach of your Facebook Page may be far less than you think. The data shows an average of 7.49% of fans view posts on a daily basis. Pages with the largest fan-base are performing the worst while pages with fewer likes are performing the best. Currently, pages with over one million likes […]

• 5 Handy New AdWords Editor Features

  In early May, Google released version 9 of AdWords Editor, with some fantastic new changes for in-house search marketers engaged in hands-on management of campaigns (and one annoying alteration). Today, I’ll show you how to get the most out of these new features! Manage Negatives More Efficiently In prior versions of AdWords Editor, negative keywords […]

• The Anatomy Of A Compelling Call To Action Button

  In the vast majority of cases, the path to a conversion starts with the click a of button. The most compelling offer in the world will not result in a website goal being completed unless you can successfully entice a visitor to hover over a button and tap their mouse. Accordingly, the biggest single thing […]

• Carter Maslan, The Face Of Google Places, Leaving The Company

  Carter Maslan has been the patient and good-natured face of Google Maps and Places at innumerable conferences and events over the past several years. He’s endured a regular onslaught of questions about missing features and local SEO frustrations surrounding Google’s increasingly important suite of local products. Now he’s leaving Google. I got word of this […]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Yahoo! Connected TV Hits 8 Million Devices… and Counting, Yahoo! Connected TV
• 10 Gmail gadgets to try, Official Gmail Blog

Business Issues

• Yahoo approaches Hulu about possible acquisition, latimes.com
• Google eyeing further display ad acquisitions, Reuters
• Google May Get Senate Subpoenas for Page, Schmidt Testimony, BusinessWeek
• Salon CEO Gingras Resigns to Become Global Head of News Products at Google, 7×7
• Yahoo Is Quietly Looking For Replacements For Carol Bartz, Says Report, Business Insider
• Yahoo, Alibaba, Softbank say making progress on Alipay, Reuters

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Google Goggles learns Russian and gets a new view, Official Google Mobile Blog
• Google’s Schmidt predicts widespread “tap and pay” within a year, FT Tech Hub

Paid Search & Contextual

• Google AdSense Publishers Share Earnings Successes & Failures, Search Engine Roundtable
• New Interface Wednesdays: Analyzing earnings by page views vs. ad requests, Inside AdSense

Searching

• How Google Might Classify Queries Differently at Different Data Centers, SEO By The Sea
• Social Annotations in Search: Now Your Social Network = Rankings, SEOmoz

SEM Industry

• Agency vs In-House vs Freelance SEO: The Endless Debate (starring Mr. Men), SEOmoz

SEO & SEM

• 3 Ways to Keep Google Panda Fed and Happy, BruceClay.com
• 5 Tips for SEO Web Design – A Guide to Onsite Search Engine Optimisation, dailyseotip.com
• Google Panda Webmaster Tools Notifications Needed?, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google’s Search Rankings Evolutions By Rand, Search Engine Roundtable
• How We Work With Data Superstructures in SEO, SEO Theory
• Learn more about AdWords with our new YouTube channel, Inside AdWords
• SEO For The Oft-Neglected Blog Home Page, Search Engine Journal
• Why Does Google Hide The # In The Twitter URLs, Search Engine Roundtable
• Would you rather spend time with a perfectly optimized website or a barrel full of kittens?, YouTube

Video, Music & Image Search

• Sunsetting the Custom Player, YouTube API Blog

Web Analytics

• New Google Analytics: Improvements in Map Overlay reports, Conversion Room

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

• Discussion: How Much Do You Teach Your Kids About SEO/Social Media? – For a lot of kids, social media is just for fun – a way to chat with friends, share links or funny pictures on Facebook and so forth. Then there are teenagers that have already used social media and SEO to create and sell start-up websites/businesses for LARGE sums of money. In our "Discussion of the Week," we want to know how much effort do you (parents) put in to teaching your kids about online marketing? Do you get into the intricacies of SEO or just talk in general terms about online visibility? Or not at all? Do your kids have a blog yet? And if you're not a parent yet, feel free to answer hypothetically about how you will handle this in the future. The floor is open!
• What Potential Impact Can HTML5 Have on SEO? – A brief overview of what impact HTML5 may have on SEO including page page segmentation and link types.
• The One Minute Paid Search Account Diagnosis – Good ideas for a quick and simple diagnosis of an existing Google AdWords pay per click account.
• PR agency loses biggest account with a single tweet – PR agency Redner Group got sacked by its biggest client, video game publisher 2k, after it tweeted that it would punish bad reviews of  the game ‘Duke Nukem Forever’ by withholding future releases from reviewers.
• The Conversion Trinity: The 3 Step Magic Formula to Increase Click Throughs & Conversions – Details how to increase conversions rates by aligning your targeting (Relevance), ads (Value) and landing pages (call-to-action).
• Why Google Panda Is More A Ranking Factor Than Algorithm Update – An interesting take on what Panda is and isn't.
• How to Create Social Landing Pages: 5 Rules – Deep post with many considerations for developing landing pages for social media uses.
• WordPress Users: Watch Out For “Fatal PHP Errors” – Nick LeRoy provides a real life case study on how fatal PHP errors on his blog stopped search engine traffic in its tracks until they were fixed.
• 35 Smart Social Media Business & Consumer Insights from @BrianSolis – About three dozen truisms that can help you focus (or re-focus) on the important big picture issues related to social media/marketing … not to mention a few details, too.