SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 29, 2012

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

From Search Engine Land:

• Optimizing Search Engine Marketing For Seasonal Opportunities

  Many in-house search marketers operate within a seasonal framework, whether a retail high season culminating in Christmas, a peak summer travel season, or another cyclical ebb and flow of sales time. Additionally events, like the Olympics or a presidential election, can impact search engine marketing for many businesses. Staying on top of these trends and […]

• The Conversion Chain In Paid Search: Beyond Traditional Key Performance Indicators

  A typical way of thinking of a SEM program is to look at multiple metrics individually, such as the average rank, cost per click, click through rate, conversion rate, cost per action, return on ad spend. Analyzing these metrics separately is a good start but does not allow search marketers to get the full picture. […]

• Beef Up B2B Publications With Rockstar Industry Conference Coverage

  Sharing. It’s a fundamental principle of social interactions that harkens back to Kindergarten 101. And yet… companies can lose sight of this essential concept when it comes to creating, syndicating, or rebroadcasting content in the social stratosphere. It’s one thing to showcase news, events, or other industry contributions of note on a company blog or […]

• How To Creatively & Effectively Build Links Using Public Data

  Governments, non-profit and other organisations are under constant pressure to improve transparency and, as a result, are making vast amounts of data available to the public. The range of data sets available is enormous, with 16 nations currently spear heading open data initiatives, and countless private organisations publishing data online – the US alone has […]

• Live Blogging the Google (Susan Wojcicki) SMX West Keynote

  Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman and Google SVP of Advertising Susan Wojcicki are now seated for her on-stage keynote interview this morning at SMX West. It’s a capacity crowd as Chris Sherman introduces Wojcicki as “one of the 50 most influential business executives” (Forbes). He also characterizes her as someone “you may not have heard of at […]

• New comScore Study Suggests 50 Percent Of Local-Mobile Search Happening In Apps

  Localeze, 15 Miles and comScore released findings from their 5th Local Search Study. The survey of 4,000 US adults (together with behavioral data) documents how consumers search for and find local business information across digital platforms. It’s a pretty comprehensive study and there are a great many interesting pieces of data, some of which I’ve […]

• msnNOW Is Driving More Traffic To Bing, But Is It Artifically Inflating Searches?

  With its msnNOW site barely two weeks old, Microsoft is already reaping benefits on another property: increased traffic to its Bing search engine. But the way it’s happening may also lead to artificial increases in Bing’s market share numbers. First, the traffic stats: Experian Hitwise tells us that downstream traffic from msnNOW to Bing jumped […]

• Google Frog Leap Day Gioachino Rossini Birthday Logo

  The more obvious reason there is a signing frog on the Google home page is because today is a leap day, happens about every four years and Google decided to leap with a frog. But the reason the frog is signing like in an opera is because it is the 220th birthday of Gioachino Rossini. […]

• Groupon Buys Travel Search Site Uptake Mostly For Headcount

  Uptake was an ambitious travel site that never quite broke through. It used social data and sentiment analysis to try and provide better travel discovery and decision support to its users. Originally called Kango, we wrote about the site in 2008 when it relaunched as Uptake. AllThingsD today reported that Uptake had been acquired by Groupon for […]

• “Spreading Santorum” Drops At Google; New Site Keeps Anal Sex Definition At Number One

  As Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum loses two primary races to rival Mitt Romney, perhaps he can console himself with, ironically, another loss. Spreading Santorum, the page defining “santorum” as a by-product of anal sex, has finally dropped from the top results on Google. The related anti-Santorum blog, however, remains. And a page from Urban […]

• Day One: Search Marketing Expo West 2012 Live Blog Recap

  SMX West day one is just about over and I wanted to post the live blogging I have found throughout the day. Here are some of the sessions that were live blogged today. Creating Conversion Friendly Mobile Landing Pages, Search Engine Roundtable Creating Conversion-Friendly Mobile Landing Pages, outspokenmedia.com Does Google Favor Brands? An In-Depth Look, […]

• Microsoft And Nokia Unify Maps On PC, Mobile

  Microsoft and Nokia announced the fruit of their recent mapping collaboration today. Each company has a blog post describing what’s changed and improved (Bing, Nokia). The effort comes out of the companies’ strategic partnership in mobile. As part of that arrangement Microsoft is relying heavily on the Nokia-Navteq mapping and data infrastructure. Nokia for its […]

Recent Headlines From MarTech, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

• Facebook’s Realtime Insights To Arrive In A Matter Of Weeks
• Facebook Finally Brings Ads To Mobile Devices
• Video: Meet The Google Doodle Team
• New Facebook Pages Released With Timeline, Pinning & Private Messaging

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Google and the News, Part 2,389: The Company Is Co-Hosting a Conference on Investigative Reporting and Tech, The Atlantic

Business Issues

• Google Web Grows in City, Wall Street Journal
• Google’s Susan Wojcicki: Where we’re heading, Fortune Tech
• Why Google Is Not Popular in Korea, ClickZ
• Google once considered issuing currency, ITworld
• Yandex Enhances Latest Content in Search Results, Yandex

Link Building

• February Linkscape Update: 66 Billion URLs, SEOmoz
• Using unexpected links on the web for predictive analytics, Majestic SEO Blog

SEM Industry

• The Guru’s Guide to Online Success, silveroakcasino.com
• It’s Official: This Week Is "Search Week", Search Engine Roundtable

SEO & SEM

• How Google Makes Liars Out of the Good Guys in SEO, SEOmoz
• Video Optimization for SEO with Schema.org, Vertical Measures
• 9 Things You Might Not Know about DKI, Search Engine Journal
• ABC’s of SEO: R is for Reputation Management, Site Visibility
• Does SEO Work for Small Business?, Vertical Measures
• February 2012 adCenter Release: Updates to Device Targeting, Bid and Budget Enhancements, adCenter Blog
• Hey SEOs, If Google Maps Calls, Don’t Answer, Local SEO Guide
• How To Become an SEO (how I did it, and how you can, too!), internetmarketingninjas.com
• Rich Snippet Reviews AND Author Now Showing In Local Results, Mike Blumenthal
• Stop Paying for Stupid Clicks: Negative Keywords for Positive ROI, SEOmoz
• Video SEO Tactics to Get Ranked, distilled

Social Media

• How to Make Facebook’s New Timeline For Pages Work For Your Brand, blueglass.com

Web Analytics

• Understanding Google Analytics Time Calculations, Analytics Talk