There are obvious and powerful reasons for retailers of all scale to focus on search engine optimization, including increased traffic and demand. But more important, search optimization gives the retailer the opportunity to meet and create customer expectations.

As PM Digital analyzes the reams of data that we have regarding natural search optimization generating increased sales and visits from branded and non-branded keywords, it has become clear that the role of search in retail is to create a natural point of connection between searchers and the retailer’s offerings.

This goes beyond simple product listings, and extends the presentation of the retailer into category presentation, editorial presentation and more. Search helps guide the visitor from their expression of intent, their search query, to the right part of your website where your brand promise and conversion funnel of your site can come into full effect.

A major retailer kept the following as a retail sales floor mandate: “We must meet customer expectations, but also create and exceed new expectations every day.” Search can fill this mandate, as well. Search optimization gives the retailer the power to be present where the customer expects them to be, but further, search can create an intersection between your brand and searcher intent where the searcher has no expectation of your participation.

Imagine that as a retailer, you have core products where your customers expect to find you. That meets their expectation. However, search gives you an unparalleled opportunity to insert yourself into searches around categories, products and values that are outside of your core.

This new intersection creates a delightful expectation that your brand promise will be fulfilled in a new arena. This allows you to extend your ability to brand, to engage and to grow.

Search optimization provides an authentic customer experience with its unabashed matching of intent and offering. High-quality search presentation is the real-life, unadorned roadmap to connecting to the brand and, by fiat, the products. Your other brand marketing initiatives create awareness, and offers and promotions create conversion opportunities, but search is where your offerings meet intent.

Search optimization creates customer acceleration. Presentation drives engagement, and engagement drives demand.

Meeting Customer Expectations

For retailers, including those whose strength lies in brand, as well as those wily players that focus on price or selection, quality search optimization allows you to meet the expectation of the searcher. When you meet the searcher’s expectation, they have greater comfort in visiting your site and consummating a transaction.

Primarily, the expectations that searchers have around finding retailers is a clear match between the overall brand along with targeted product presentation and your position in search engines. Our research tells us that more than 98% of all search traffic is generated by listings on the first three pages of search results, with more that 80% of the traffic coming from Google’s top 20 listings.

It is crucial that your presentation capture the highest quality positions in the search engines, otherwise, you are offering your brand promise to an empty room. Throughout all of your marketing, your brand positioning, and multi-channel advertising, the savvy retailer has created a value proposition, a set of expectations that the average consumer will understand through your messaging.

The expectation that you set revolve around your specific brands terms, like your name, your name plus obvious or signature products, and likely, your name plus some assortment of modifiers like “sale,” “discount” and “coupon.” If your customers can’t find you in these spots where you have created the expectation that you should be, then you won’t be meeting customer expectations.

If you are a branded merchant, with a message and a set of core values, your customers have an expectation of reliability and availability from you. If they search for the most basic expression of desire to engage with you, like searching for your brand name or your brand name with some basic modifiers like location or product, and you can’t be found in the most visible spots in search, your customer will experience a disconnect.

There will be some measure of trust that is broken. If your other advertising drives awareness, and that awareness cannot be fulfilled through engagement through search, you have not met the expectations that you have set with the customer.

Create and Grow

Regardless if you are a large brand or an online-only player looking to create a splash, search visibility gives you the opportunity to meet, create and surpass customer expectations in a dramatic way.

For the established brand, search visibility across your core offerings is a primary tactic for reinforcing your brand positioning and activating those customers that you have engaged through other media. Search gives you the leverage to power re-engagement when the searcher is not specifically engaged with your brand. Visibility and position act as enticements and cross-channel brand visibility will drive the searcher to a trusted brand relationship and, hopefully, a resulting click through.

For the brand that is extending beyond its core, or if you are a player that has not invested heavily in brand-building, search optimization can drive visibility and enhanced brand recognition through impression strength and relevancy. In some ways, the major search engines act as a qualified third-party referral. If Google thinks that your site is worthy, that will transfer some level of trust to the searcher who may be more compelled to click through and engage with your brand.

Search visibility creates opportunity to drive ahead new growth categories and new opportunities. It also has the power to activate your customers when, perhaps, they weren’t thinking of you. Regardless of the state of your brand, high-level visibility through search optimization drives visibility, traffic and demand. More, though, it creates and cements emotional brand connectivity that will impact sales for years.

Without it, you will be easily surpassed by the competition and you could be tossed to the top of the brand scrap heap.

In many market sectors, the traditional retailer is under siege. Take the apparel sector. Discounters such as Overstock.com, flash-sale sites like Gilt Groupe and Rue La La, fast-fashion players including Century 21, massive marketplaces such as Amazon, and fashion blogs like The Style Rookie have created a treacherous landscape for apparel retailers, which can no longer expect offline-branding or retail-footprint alone to adequately secure their online fortunes.

An apparel retailer, or any other type of merchant, that has its marketing and branding efforts siloed and is not evaluating its integrated business is at risk of losing its place in the online discussion.   

Case in Point: “Men’s Fashion”

Before you dismiss this as alarmist, let’s look at a simple example: men’s fashion. This is a good benchmark, as most menswear customers look primarily to retailers to inform their fashion choices. But of all the listings on the first page of Google for “men’s fashion,” only two are retailers.

The threat here is not that content sites such as GQ or About.com are taking control of the men’s fashion discussion, but rather that a straight affiliate play like www.mens-fashion-tips.com could capture more natural-search attention than Armani or Ralph Lauren or even Lands’ End.

These results, of course, are an algorithmic byproduct. Search engines aren’t editorial, so they typically do not favor one site over another for content reasons. They focus on how well the site matches their interpretation of quality and relevance for a particular search query. So why did only two retailers show up on page 1 for this query? Because the apparel merchants let it happen. They have ceded their voice in the search discussion for “men’s fashion.” 

As we dive deeper and narrower with search terms such as “men’s pants,” we see a much more retailer-focused environment, with Kohl’s, Macy’s, Banana Republic, and Gap among the diverse merchants appearing on the first page. And while the term “men’s pants” is still a very broad query, it does express significant intent to deeply engage with pertinent content.  And, at this level of query, the retailer rules the day. Why?

For the top-level query, such as “men’s fashion,” the eventual desired destination of the searcher is unclear. It is hard to tell if that searcher wants to learn more about men’s fashion, see videos about men’s fashion, or shop for men’s fashion. Over times, however, search engines have learned that the average search for “men’s pants” yields a click through to a retailer.

The Four Pillars of Optimization

The question remains: How does the apparel retailer—or any other retailer, really—position itself, from a natural-search perspective, to have a place in the broader discussion, at the edges of expressed intent to engage, in order to create a wide funnel and compel as many users as possible to engage with its brand?

There are four basic pillars of search engine optimization that elevate brands to the very widest end of the funnel or to the very top of a particular category.

Pillar 1: Keywords and Targeting. To properly position yourself to be part of a broad conversation, or even to infiltrate a targeted conversation in the search engines, you must have some degree of relevancy or you won’t have the legitimacy, never mind the natural-search ranking, to even be in that conversation. 

To play in the “men’s fashion” game, your site needs to have the keywords “men’s fashion” as a prominent part of it. To be relevant, you must have a clear relationship with the topic at hand. An association with a subject alone does not make you part of the discussion. “Stylish and affordable men’s pants, $79.99, free shipping” doesn’t put you at the table, in the same way that saying, “I once hit three home runs in a high school baseball game” does not reasonably associate you with Albert Pujols, either.

To be part of the conversation, research and target those keywords that show the widest visibility and greatest point of consumer engagement. Create relevancy on your site by creating content that is appropriate to the target keyword, create pages that are appropriate to the target, and create excitement around that target.

Pillar 2: Controllable Variables—On-site Optimization. In the world of the Internet, the only things that you can totally control are the elements of your own site. By mastering these elements, such as titling and tags, as well as search-optimized navigation and site structures, you can create an environment that is more conducive to search engine visibility for the terms that you target. These elements are crucial to the search engine spiders’ being able to access all of your content. And, of course, in order to play at the widest end of the discussion, you need to have great content around the target. (See Pillar 4.)

Pillar 3: Influenced Variables—Off-site Optimization. Off-site optimization, or more fundamentally, link building, is a core exercise in building overall awareness. A laserlike focus on link building from topically relevant sites with anchor text that targets the target keyword is the key to achieving top visibility for a particular keyword.

While this may seem like a dark art to some, targeted link building drives relevance to your site for your target keywords, and the search engines recognize this as authoritative and highly relevant context. The goal is to find the appropriate link partners and craft the right message to get them engaged enough to give you a link with your target keyword as anchor text. We typically find that these kinds of link-building exercises take enormous time and focus.

Pillar 4: Content. Content, they say, is king. And the single biggest reason that apparel retailers in particular have not seen success in infiltrating the broadest kinds of discussion on the Internet is that they do not create much content outside of product descriptions. To compete with the editorially driven sites and earn your right at the premiere place for the largest search volume query, you must have content that is unique, targeted, well executed, and focused on both the search engines and the users.

As with editorial players, the goal of retailers is to drive visibility through the leveraging of your domain expertise. Further, the quality content helps drive the value of your presentation at the edges of search intent. These kinds of presentations create true value for your consumer, and that, combined with the high quality expressed in your brand promise, will help drive the searcher to click through to your site rather than an affiliate site or an editorial site. Once engaged with this content, the searcher is accelerated into your sales funnel at high velocity.

Content is difficult to create, but the double benefit of increased presentation and velocity-driven customers is simply unparalleled. To wit, watch what the Gilt Groupe has done to drive natural-search optimization into an ecommerce model.  They cleverly use content, friend-building and in-bound links to drive up their rankings and, most recently, partnering with the television show White Collar, it’s becoming a storyteller rather than a retailer.

Traditional retailers are under attack. From direct brand solicitations to socially savvy shoppers hunting through Polyvore and Shopbop, they have never faced so much competition. But by focusing on the four pillars of search, a retailer can take back its voice, grab hold of the conversation, and drive ahead its editorial voice and shape the market and maximize its unique advantages. 

Search is powerful…but only when you use it.

iPad is rapidly gaining share in terms of site visits.  With just a few weeks of availability, the iPad has shown rapid growth and in some cases, has overtaken more established mobile devices in terms of visits.  While iPad visits make up a small proportion of total site visits (typically less than 0.5%), this fast growth shows promise.  Whether this rapid growth rate can be sustained in the longer term remains to be seen.

iPad browsing behavior is more similar to desktop than mobile. Average pageviews per visit, bounce rate, and conversion rate from iPad visits tend to be more like desktop browser averages than mobile.  The table below compares site metrics among the most popular mobile devices to the site average – iPad usage is clearly not like the others.  The most likely explanation is the screen size which makes the user experience more like a desktop than a mobile device.  Based on site usage stats, the iPad web browser would be more appropriately classified as a desktop browser in tools like Google Analytics and Omniture SiteCatalyst.  The inability to view Flash content on the iPad is the primary difference, but most savvy online marketers are delivering Flash-free alternatives to the iPad and mobile device visitors.

iPad visits skew toward being email- and search-initiated. We were curious to know what was driving iPad visits to sites and if it differed from desktop usage.  It appears that iPad visits tend to skew more towards being email and search engine driven.  Traffic from email makes sense — the iPad is great for checking email and the ability to click on a promotion to visit a website is obvious.

Search was a little surprising at first although upon closer consideration it makes sense too.  The Safari web browser on the iPad provides an integrated search box.  When launching a new web browser window, text focus goes to the search box instead of the URL field, thereby encouraging individuals to use search as the default method of navigation.  Search results, both natural and paid, will remain an important factor for iPad users. It’s important to note that traffic sources vary greatly from site to site based on factors like industry vertical, marketing programs and brand recognition.

These initial stats seem very promising for the iPad and it will be interesting to see if these patterns hold up beyond the early adopters.  Marketers should examine iPad usage stats for their own websites and work towards making their site iPad-friendly.

Anthony Avolio is Director of Web Analytics at PM Digital.

While website owners can’t dictate the specific links to use in their organic listing, Google does provide the ability to disable individual sitelinks from appearing in their organic results.  Rather than disabling questionable or unwanted organic sitelinks blindly, marketers should use web analytics to measure the usage and effectiveness of each link beforehand. Also, Google introduced the option to include sitelinks in paid search listings late last year, which has proven to be very effective for advertisers.  Understanding the performance of organic sitelinks can be helpful in choosing sitelinks to test in your paid search program.

Because sitelinks are organic listings, it’s not possible to add custom tags to these links for direct measurement.  Instead, sitelink activity must be inferred based on the landing page of visits from natural search brand terms.  Entries on your homepage are likely the result of clicks on the main search result link.  Non-homepage entries are most likely the result of clicks on individual sitelinks.

For example, take the screenshot above, which shows how a search for “pm digital” recently appeared on Google.  Clicks on any of these links will be attributed to the natural search term of “pm digital” although the landing page varies depending on the link clicked on.  Measuring the number of visits by landing page is an indication of each sitelink’s popularity.  Also, visitor’s onsite behavior from these various entry points provides a measure of how valuable each of these links are.  Sitelinks with a high bounce rate or low conversion rate could be candidates to be disabled if other, potentially more relevant sitelinks exist.  Keep in mind that some valuable links may naturally have a high bounce rate.  For example, a sitelink for ‘Store Locations’ may provide searchers exactly the information they want in a single pageview.

Because sitelinks often vary by search engine, analyses should be conducted one engine at a time.  Also, search engines adjust sitelinks over time, so it’s best to analyze a recent timeperiod or one where you know which sitelinks were presented to searchers.

Google Analytics makes it very easy to measure sitelink activity using the method outlined above.

1. Start with your Traffic Sources > Search Engines report and drill down into one search engine (e.g., google).
2. Select “non-paid” in the Show list so that data reflects organic search visits only.
3. Drilldown further into your top brand keyword (e.g., “pm digital”).
4. In the resulting Detail report, change the dropdown menu from ‘None’ to ‘Landing Page’ to view data by that dimension (confirm that “non-paid” is still selected in the Show list).

Measuring Organic Sitelinks in Google Analytics (click to enlarge)

The resulting report shows the popularity of each landing page and key traffic metrics associated with those visits.  Ecommerce metrics and goal conversions are also reported for each landing page for assessment and to help determine the potential impact of disabling one of the sitelinks in favor of others.

The same analysis concept outlined above can be applied to other web analytics packages too.  For example, in Coremetrics Analytics, a Key Segment can be created to isolate natural search traffic from a specific engine and keyword.  The Key Segment can then be applied to the Content Categories report to view site entries by landing page.  In Omniture Sitecatalyst, the Data Warehouse tool can be used to create a segment based on natural search traffic for a specific engine and brand keyword(s).  The Data Warehouse report can be constructed to break down visits and other site metrics by Entry Page.

Anthony Avolio is Director of Web Analytics at PM Digital.

Search is a big channel. There are die-hard people in the SEO world who never think about paid search as part of search…it’s advertising they say. There are PPC jockeys who have disdain for anything that doesn’t have an easy metric and a quick way to A-B test. Anything else is squishy, they say.

Well, any debate that pits natural search vs. paid search is missing the synergistic whole.

It’s all SEARCH.

Search is about the traffic that comes from results to specific queries. And while there is a difference between the way paid and natural search works, as a marketer, it may help you to think of them as a single channel, because they work together so well.

Imagine that your best paid keyword is dog bones and you pay $1.00 per click. And you drive some high quality traffic through paid search. And then you start to grow your presence in natural search. Let’s say you get dog bones into the top 10, and you start driving big traffic from that word. You might think about giving up your paid search budget for that word, because your natural search has started driving traffic at volume, and you have become overly efficient in your paid advertising for dog bones. You can no longer amp up the paid search volume by bidding more…so paid search can no longer put the pedal to the metal, as they say.

What has happened here? Has paid search lost it’s magic? NO WAY.

Let’s jump into some math – if you generate 5,000 clicks from dog bones via paid search per month, you are spending $5,000. If you are making a good ROI on that amount then great! But as your natural search visibility creeps up, you may find that it is only possible to spend $4500 at the same efficiency. Does this mean that that dog bones is no longer a good word? Absolutely not.

If you expand your focus and look at paid search and natural search together as a single channel, you might see a different story. Your TOTAL traffic from the word dog bones may have skyrocketed. Think of your 4,500 clicks from paid search in the context of the 5000 clicks that you are also getting from natural search. If you look at this as a whole channel, your average cost per click has just been more than halved (or your ROI has more than doubled). And if I use my fancy MBA calculator, I am pretty sure that either result is pretty great.

If we go back to your original budget of $5,000 for 5,000 clicks, and we look at your current situation of 9,500 clicks for $4,500, you will see that you are in a much better position with regard to the word dog bones. And you have at least $500 of budget that you can apply to testing new words, or amping up the volume on a word like dog bone holders where you don’t have premiere organic search visibility.

Search as a whole is a more powerful tool than looking at the natural and organic sides independently. Search is too big to be contained in silos. Let’s think that paid and natural search are different sales funnels, but they all point to the same cash register….yours.

Tim Kilroy is Vice President of Natural Search at PM Digital.

Internet Retailer – Internet Retailer currently hosts two key shows each year – the Web Design & Usability Conference which was just held last week in Orlando, and the larger Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition in June.  This year’s main conference will be in Chicago from June 8-11.   If you are actively involved in web design, the February show would be valuable to attend.  For more general retail info, I am a big fan of the June show.  It draws a huge crowd (great for networking and exhibiting), and there is a ton of great content.  Our clients also rate this show highly for value and time well invested. 

Shop.org – Shop.org hosts several conferences throughout the year.  The best known and largest of all the online retail shows is the Shop.org Annual Summit in the fall.  This show has frequently been held in Las Vegas , but it’s moving to Dallas for 2010.  The change is unfortunate as I predict they are going to take a hit on attendance.  The Mandalay Bay venue in Las Vegas was much loved and Dallas pales by comparison.  The Shop.org shows have the reputation of being extremely retailer-focused, as opposed to eTail which is more vendor-focused.  Shop.org has retailer-only days and retailer-only events.  But despite their somewhat heavy-handed non-vendor stance, there are many sponsorships available to vendors, although some (like the vendor-hosted tables on retailer-only day) come with a pretty hefty price tag.

One of Shop.org’s other (smaller) events has just been retooled.  It is called the Retail & Innovation Marketing Conference and will be hosted in San Francisco from March 2-4.  This show focuses on next-generation media.  Social media had been a key topic at prior shows, and this year mobile will be a big area of focus.  I have really enjoyed this show in the past, but the reality is that there are so many shows crammed into a tight six-week period between February and March that marketers are challenged to squeeze them all in.  I personally could not make the Retail & Innovation show work with my schedule this year.

Retail Marketing Conference and DMA - These are two offline shows that attract many of the same retailers who also attend the online retail shows.  After years of declining attendance, the ACCM catalog conference has been renamed and presumably retooled.  It is now called the Retail Marketing Conference and will be held May 24-27 in Kissimmee, Florida.   The thrust of the agenda for this year’s show is “integrated marketing” with mostly online content spanning social media, SEM, mobile, e-commerce and catalog/print.   The new show doesn’t sound that much different than the Internet Retailer, E-Tail or Shop.org conferences.  I’m sure the Retail Marketing Conference will continue to draw a large offline audience made up of prior attendees of the ACCM, so the Direct Marketing Association (who runs this show) would be foolish to kill that offline content.  After all, there are still plenty of catalogs in my mailbox every day, so it’s not like this business is going away.   I remain on the fence about this event.  If the retooled content and rebranding works, it would be a great show.  If they aren’t able to get attendance back up, however, I imagine it may be the last year for this conference.

With regard to the DMA itself, I have attended the big annual conference for the past 10 years and have come to the conclusion that from an online perspective, I get very little out of this show.   One year the DMA filled up a pretty awesome online pavilion of exhibitors, but it wasn’t successful because they housed it across the street which drew very little foot traffic.  The next year, the online and offline exhibitors bordered each other in the main exhibit hall, and in subsequent years, many of the online exhibitors dropped out.  So thinking solely of online, I am ambivalent about the fate of this show. The DMA:2010 Conference & Exhibition is scheduled for October 9-14 in San Francisco.

ad:tech – This is such a fun, mobbed, upbeat show with great energy!  There are two large U.S. ad:tech conferences along with a variety of smaller events throughout the year.  The big U.S. shows are ad:tech San Francisco (April 19-21) and ad:tech New York (November 2-4).  Audiences for these events consist largely of agency and technology people, job hunters and employers.  There is very little content that is applicable to an actual marketer – it is largely technology-focused for agencies.  It will be interesting to see if this year’s NYC show can maintain the same high-energy atmosphere in its new digs at the Javits Center vs. the Hilton which had been its home for many years. 

Last year we saw attendance at all the shows plummet.  We are optimistic that this year they will go back up.  We have also noticed that marketers often attend the exact same conference year after year.  My recommendation would be to mix it up and do one of the eTail, Internet Retailer, or Shop.org shows and then perhaps add an SES or SMX show.  Next year you should consider switching it up.  Note that in my opinion there is really no reason to go to more than one or two of the retail shows and only one of the search shows in a given year.  You’ll quickly find that the content is not exclusive to each show.

Click here for Part 1 of our Online Marketing Conference Guide.

Suzy Sandberg is President of PM Digital.

Because PM Digital has a heavy penetration of retail clients, we attend many conferences in the retail category as will be evident in this roundup.  The list below takes into account that there are generally three reasons to attend trade shows:  1) networking, 2) keeping current, and 3) investigating new technologies.

eTail - eTail hosts two big shows each year.  eTail West (which starts today) is the larger and runs from February 22-24 in Palm Desert; eTail East will be held in Baltimore from August 9-12.   I personally love the timing of the February eTail show since it’s the first big event after the holiday season.  People have had a few weeks to relax and breathe, but they also recognize that now is the time to launch new initiatives in order to maximize the next year-end holiday.  Attendees are definitely looking and researching at this conference.

A common criticism of the eTail shows is that it seems partial to vendors rather than retailers, and this manifests itself in sessions that occasionally sound like paid commercials.  Many of the session panels include vendors, and there are some big keynote slots given to vendors (and as a vendor, we are aware that there is a cost to speak at this show as well as some of the other events).   I once left a multivariate testing session and found one of the companies represented on the panel was also the manning the exits with one-sheeters.  I haven’t seen anything that blatant happen in a while but it’s a good example of how eTail developed its vendor-first reputation.  The August eTail conference is very convenient if you are on the East Coast, and I’ve found it attracts a high-level retail attendee.  It is much smaller than the West Coast show.

NEMOA – Otherwise known as the New England Mail Order Association, NEMOA typically holds a spring and fall conference each year.  The NEMOA Spring 2010 Conference runs from March 10-12 in Boston.  As one can deduce from the organization’s name, attendance is comprised largely of New England retailers, although a smattering of companies who are based elsewhere also come to this event.  This show definitely draws a high-level executive and is far more intimate than the other retail shows.  For example, content is delivered in a general session as opposed to the myriad of tracks and concurrent sessions you find elsewhere.  NEMOA has a very strict policy for its vendors in order to ensure that this conference is entirely retail-focused.  There are no exhibitors at NEMOA.

SES (Search Engine Strategies) and SMX (Search Marketing Expo) - These are rival companies who put on shows with similar search-engine related content.  Each has an East and West Coast show with smaller regional events in between.  SES New York will be held in its namesake city from March 22-26; SES San Francisco will run from August 16-20.  SMX West will be held March 2-4 in Santa Clara and SMX East in NYC from October 4-6.  These shows all have great search engine content spanning both PPC and SEO.  The SMX show has a reputation for being a little heavier on higher level SEO content whereas the SES shows gives equal weight to both.  If someone wants to immerse themselves in PPC and SEO, these shows are great – especially for those who do not have much (or any) contact with search engine vertical teams.  My recommendation would be to first attend SES for a more general overview and then try SMX if you are in need of deeper SEO content.

Click here for Part 2 of our Online Marketing Conference Guide.

Suzy Sandberg is President of PM Digital.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am mildly obsessed with coffee. I savor it, gulp it, glory in it. But really, it is all about the caffeine. Caffeine makes me feel alive. Caffeine makes me engaged. Caffeine makes my heart purr along at 600 beats per minute. Caffeine is essential. Google shares my love for the caffeinated lifestyle. They are obsessed with speed. They want their servers chugging along like they’ve spent the afternoon with 400 of their favorite baristas. Google is ready to rock Caffeine, their new internal search architecture.  Google Caffeine is ready to roll out after the holidays.

What Does Google Caffeine Mean to Marketers?

Fundamentally, it doesn’t change your current search positions a lot. The essential algorithm that Google uses to determine which sites are relevant for particular terms isn’t really changing that much in the near term (but look out…big changes are coming…more on that before Christmas). But there are nuances that are becoming evident:

1. Indexing - Caffeine is all about indexing speed for Google. How many more pages can Google add to its index and how quickly?  Caffeine represents a significant change in Google’s housekeeping. This is good for Google. They are speeding up the indexing because the web is exploding in its growth. (See my Here Comes The Flood for more info on the whats, whys, and wheres of the explosions).  Google needs to get faster so that it can keep up with the deluge of new information and links. The takeaway for marketers is that you can expect to see your newer pages show up in the index (but not necessarily well ranked) sooner. Speed of indexation is good, but a bigger index means that you have even MORE work to do to keep yourself visible. You will likely have to do less work to become seen by Google, but more work to be visible to searchers.

2. Filtering - Google has become really aggressive about filtering duplicate content. As they speed the indexing, they need to step up the filtering process to insure that they don’t have 6500 versions of the same URL in the index. So, if you have duplicate content, or have pages that are “modestly unique”, like two shirts that are the same except in color, you can be sure that Google will be more aggressive about filtering out one of those shirts. (By the way, there are ways to counteract this issue that I will be covering in a near-term post.) This can be a very disconcerting issue for marketers, especially retailers. Make sure that you are giving search engines every possible opportunity to find all of your URLs through HTML site maps, XML site maps, RSS feeds, Google Product feeds, etc., etc., etc.

3. Content Frequency – If this update is all about indexing and speed, then it makes sense that the marketer ought to adapt to an even faster-moving world. There are tons of ways to make your brand more visible when high frequency is essential. Try blogging, social media, contests, press releases, interviews, editorial content, opinion pieces, giveaways, customer profiles, free advice (and I just came up with all of those in the last 7 seconds…thanks to caffeine!) In so many respects, it doesn’t matter what your industry is, it matters that you are active in it. Static websites that change once a quarter are so 2000…in 2010 it is about dynamic, content-driven information experiences. Frequent, thoughtful, value-added content will grow your opportunity (and your brand voice) in a way that is simply unimaginable in an uncaffeinated world.

4. Site Speed – Google has come out and said it — they are obsessed with speed. The faster something happens, the better. The same goes for your site. Speed matters. Matt Cutts, the uber-search guru at Google has speculated that site speed will become part of the algorithm. If you are lagging, get on the phone with your hosting company, your IT guys and maybe call a content delivery network to drive ahead your site speed. It matters for customers and for search engines. Really. Seconds and milliseconds count. Don’t be satisfied with “fast enough”. Be satisfied with “fastest in my vertical.”

5. Social Media – This may sound like a tired refrain by now, but social media matters. It matters that you are active in it. It also matters that you allow visitors to your site to share what they find. Make it easy for visitors to share what they think about you with everyone they know. Easy fixes are ShareThis or AddThis (not an endorsement, just top of mind). Make your site a spot where information is fluid with opportunities for visitors to interact with you and also share what they find with their sphere of influence.  This matters because Google Caffeine was built to index this kind of dynamic content development and information sharing. If you aren’t adapting to your ever-changing environment, then you will lose marketshare.

Caffeine is about speed. Speed is needed because the internet is growing at such an amazing rate that keeping up with it is an unimaginably complex task. The internet is a wildly growing information organism that is evolving rapidly. Speed is needed to keep up with the expansion. In order for you to stay ahead of the need for speed, take stock of where you stand on these issues. Are you fast enough? Do you share enough? Are you frequent enough? Are you unique enough?

Are you ready for a cuppa?

Tim Kilroy is Vice President of Natural Search at PM Digital.

To that end, below are five easy-to-use SEO tools that we encourage any marketer to check out. And best of all, they’re all free!

1. SEOTools Back Link Analyzer

Back Link Analyzer quickly determines anchor text, page title and number of inbound links to a page. This is a great tool that gives you insight to how the page gets its visibility in search. Links are food for search engines, and this tool gives you an idea how satisfying your page (or a competitor’s page) is. We use this tool to inform our link building and search improvement activities.

2. Website Grader

True to its name, Website Grader attempts to “grade” the effectiveness of your website vs. competitors. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. This tool gives you a great way to objectively look at your page from a search perspective. It looks at all of the on-page elements that search engines look at and points out your weaknesses. Website Grader is a great tool that provides objective measurement with a no-nonsense result.

3. Total Validator

Total Validator provides a one-stop-shop chockfull of validation tools – an HTML validator, an accessibility validator, a spelling validator and a broken links validator.  This tool is a spot check to reveal any technical issues on your page. Search engines value standards compliance, and Total Validator gives you a completely objective look at how compliant you page code is. Poor technical construction and standards non-compliance can cause search engines to skip crawling your site or diminish its search visibility.

And no listing of top SEO tools would be complete without a few Firefox Add-ons, as Firefox remains a favored browser for SEOs everywhere.

4. X-Ray

X-Ray gives marketers a quick way to see a webpage’s tags without having to view the source code. X-Ray is simply an indispensable tool. It illuminates the meta-data, inbound link volume and essential code elements like H1 tags without having to look at source code. This speeds up the technical discovery process and can easily show even the non-search expert points that need improvement.

5. SEOpen

SEOpen gives marketers a quick look at the the number of indexed pages and inbound links on the major search engines. Also you get a look at Alexa rankings and more. This great tool aggregates important information all in one place!

Jeffrey Cohen is CIO/CTO of PM Digital.

I sat in on a good session from Hitwise Research Director Heather Doughtery this week that looked back at Black Friday 2008 and offered some preliminary stats for Black Friday 2009. The findings are fairly predictable and mirror what we know from our own data:  consumers are researching earlier and looking for deals.  The bigger question for this season is to what degree the economy and unemployment will accelerate the thrifty, marketing-savvy behaviors already in play.  Below are a few takeaways:

Black Friday searches start earlier each year. Per Hitwise, early “Black Friday” searches in 2006 started the week ending 9/30; for 2009 those same searches started the week ending 8/8.  At this rate, “Christmas in July” may lose its oxymoron status by next year.  Of course we’re talking searches, not purchases.  But unless a retailer is sitting on headline-grabbing price reductions for late in the season, capturing mindshare early is crucial.  Consumers need to know where the good deals are coming from, and a retailer may have to expend more effort now if they haven’t laid the groundwork already.

Black Friday sites receive the most traffic from “Black Friday” searches. This may seem like a shoulder-shrug finding, but the key players are worth a closer look.   Per Hitwise, deal aggregators like BlackFriday.info and bfads.net received over 60% of “Black Friday” search traffic in 2008.  Thus far in 2009, the audience for these sites has skewed female, younger (under 35) and less affluent (under $100k), but looking at historic trends for the full holiday period, Black Friday deal sites are also gaining ground with the 35+ crowd.  For retailers interested in local search, it’s also notable that Black Friday website visitors in 2009 are indexing highest east of the Mississippi – especially in states like West Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri.

Searches are growing for “Black Friday” terms tied to retail brands. Searches for branded “Black Friday” terms (e.g. “walmart black friday”) grew 41% between 2007 and 2008.  This is most notable for big box retailers with mega brands and deep pockets, as “Black Friday” terms can be pricey.  For others, there remain good SEO and content opportunities for capturing “Black Friday” searches tied to brand.

With regard to social media, the only 2008 data Hitwise noted was that 3% of traffic to Black Friday deal sites came from social networks.  I would say that if any significant new variable exists for Black Friday 2009, it will come from platforms like Facebook and Twitter.  Both have the ability to distribute special alerts and coupon codes quickly to an existing (and hopefully growing) group of retail fans and followers.

Of course the biggest unknown this holiday season are consumers themselves.  Times are tough.  It remains to be seen how much money folks will spend related to all those Black Friday bargains they’ve been busily researching.  No amount of third-party click data can answer that question quite yet.

Glenn Lalich is VP of Research & Analysis at PM Digital.