The notion, according to the usual suspects “people familiar with the plan”, is that under this new scheme music will be streamed directly onto Google pages.

Of particular concern is the proposal that alongside the songs you’ll find a handy “buy” button, taking you to “a variety of different sites, including Amazon.com and Apple Inc’s iTunes Music Store”. This will, Reuters reports, “help reduce the number of steps fans need to purchase their favorite songs or albums.”

It’ll also potentially reduce the revenues of music resellers other than the favored few in partnership with Google.

We don’t want to be alarmist, but what happens next if this new “buy” feature turns out to be highly profitable for Google and its preferred partners?

Will we see a hazardous new direction for Google, where the corporate titan turns its search pages into ecommerce BUY NOW displays, in direct competition with advertisers and with anyone else who allows/encourages Google to index their site?

It’s not difficult to imagine a scenario where a search on Google (the sherlock of choice for most of us) for, say, “PlayStation 4″ delivers a prominently displayed “Buy” button in conjunction with Wal-Mart or Best Buys, leaving other consumer electronics outlets competing for the crumbs on pages 2 through infinity.

We’ve already heard, via the Frankfurt Book Fair, that Google is gearing up to launch its own online bookstore, “Editions”. Once that facility is up and running, Google’s shareholders would have every reason to expect that any book title available for sale via Editions would be prominently displayed (perhaps with that dreaded “Buy” button) in response to relevant Google searches. That’s hardly going to endear the Googleplex to Amazon, Barnes & Noble or about a trillion other booksellers around the world.

We could even see a whole new tier of Google advertisers/partners emerge — those who are willing to bid for access to the Buy button for their choice of keywords. It would certainly make a rich new revenue stream for Google (whilst somewhat devaluing AdWords as an advertising currency).

We are heartened by the Google corporate mantra, “do no evil”. But we also remember the words of Google co-founder Larry Page: “The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.”

That could mean giving a big fat BUY button to those consumers who can articulate exactly what they want (by brand name, rank and serial number).

Should we be afraid?

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The best advice, of course, comes from those who’ve actually implemented search strategies — and whose businesses have had to live with the results. MultiChannelMerchant.com recently published an article by Richard Sexton president/CEO of furniture and home decor merchant Carolina Rustica dealing with the question “how can i-merchants perform good SEO easily and cost-effectively?”

Richard’s list of best practices comes from more than a decade of operating his furniture and lighting retail Website, Carolinarustica.com. His ten key points:

1. Content is king
   This is the single most important consideration for optimizing your Website. Yet it’s amazing how many Website owners and designers neglect Website content. You should be an expert on the products you sell, and be able to address any conceivable questions customers may have, either on your product pages, or in your FAQ’s, or elsewhere. Including customer reviews on your site is a great way to accomplish this. Also, make your site informative and straightforward, and other folks will not only want to visit your site, but they may link to it from their own sites and blogs.
2. Pay-per-click
   Although PPC programs do not technically count as SEO endeavors, they are an important step in bringing potential customers to your site, and work with your SEO efforts to generate Website traffic. Your immediate PPC efforts are directed towards converting those visitors you have paid for into customers. But the secondary effect of PPC is that you are generating interest in your site, whether those visitors buy or not. We continue to dedicate a large portion of our SEM budget to Google AdWords. This is not only for conversions, but because those paid visitors are bookmarking our site and many are placing orders at a later point in time—or they’re telling a family member or friend about us. PPC can act as a catalyst for viral marketing of your site even if you are not measuring immediate conversions.
3. On-site search and site champion
   We use a third-party Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) provider called SLI Systems for our on-site search. SLI has developed a technology called “Learning Search” that provides the most relevant search results when visitors are looking for specific products on our site. SLI has another hosted service, Site Champion, which is critical to our SEO efforts. Site Champion creates landing pages of search results for particular keywords on our Website. Those landing pages can be indexed by most search engines and actually appear in the first or second page of search results when customers are searching the Web using those same keywords. Site Champion generated more than 25,000 leads to our site in the first quarter of 2009, with customers clicking on Google, Yahoo, and MSN search results for keywords such as “shell chandelier” or “countertop brackets.” This approach is much more cost effective than bidding for top placement for those same terms on the search engines, which allows us to allocate our PPC budget to other keywords that don’t rank as well. What’s more, these search results tend to convert well since the customer is directed to a landing page that is basically an on-site search result—not a generic company page. We continue to rely on Site Champion as our third-most significant vehicle for site referrals.
4. Paid inclusion
   Carolina Rustica also uses paid inclusion, which involves a third party taking our raw product feed and essentially reformatting it for optimal placement on specific search engines. This is a paid service, independent of PPC efforts, and it gives us an acceptable conversion rate for our investment.  Best of all, it involves virtually no effort on our part after we have set up the product feed. We use a company called Booyah for this service.
5. Analyze and optimize
   You can’t improve SEO without understanding the dynamics of your site’s traffic. And you can’t beat Google Analytics for providing an in-depth snapshot of your Website dynamics. Google Analytics is linked to our AdWords account so we can see how our AdWords spend converts into sales, but just as important, Google Analytics looks at our other sources of paid and non-paid traffic to examine those same dynamics. It’s also a great way to measure and compare your site’s performance over segments of time.
6. E-mail campaigns
   E-mails can help your SEO efforts by generating interest and traffic to your site. Websites that deluge new customers with e-mails day after day, however, face diminishing returns and higher opt-out rates. We send out e-mails to our 30,000 contacts when we have something interesting or unique to offer—about once a month. Our click-through rate is higher as a result, and this further helps with SEO. We use Vertical Response for our e-mail service.
7. Blogs
   Blogging is one of the easiest ways to generate content for your site, and you control it 100%. With a blog, you can create your own third-party site that points to your main site. You should focus on topics that are important to your site’s visibility, but also add content that is a little more daring or personal than what you may have on your Website. I try to write at least an article a week for our blog, http://carolinarustica.blogspot.com. We use Google’s free Blogger, which makes it easy to add content. You can also promote your Website through other people’s blogs that are relevant to your industry. Try exchanging articles or using a sweepstakes for blog readers, which is always appreciated. While search engines frown upon paid links, creating useful and relevant links on other blogs to original content on your site is a great way to increase your site’s visibility.
8. Affiliate programs
   We are just beginning to explore affiliate programs, but I believe they can help your site’s SEO endeavors by the propagation of coupon sites that use affiliate networks to provide coupon content. Two of the largest coupon sites, Retailmenot.com and CouponMountain.com, don’t rely on affiliates, but there is a host of others that do—and more are appearing every month. Coupon sites provide inbound links to your site, but you need to determine you can afford the cost of the affiliate programs and the decreased profit margin generated by coupons.
9. Social networking
   If you sell products or services targeted towards Gen Y, Z or beyond, social networking via youth-oriented sites like Facebook is an extremely cost-effective pursuit. Twitter, which everyone seems to be using, can also give your site increased exposure by links to your company blog and updates (tweets) on genuinely newsworthy events. Other more targeted social networking platforms such as LinkedIn provide exposure to more technically oriented communities. Social networking sites are built primarily on user-generated content (UGC), however, and this may be out of your control to moderate. We have found YouTube to be a great platform for our business, since our furniture and lighting lends itself to a more visual presentation.
10. Wikis
    Pioneered by Wikipedia, wikis are sites that provide non-commercial, non-promotional content—just the facts. I can say with certainty that wikis cannot hurt, particularly if you are trying to make some clarification about your business or Website. But wikis may not be the best avenue unless you have a compelling, unique story to tell. If you have customers or suppliers who want to tell your story for you on wikis, however, they can become a good source of inbound content.

No real surprises on the list, but some useful tips. and one overall outtake — don’t put all your online marketing eggs in one basket (i.e. search). Plug into a variety of tools and techniques for optimum effect

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In the words of the Washington Post, “ToysRUs really didn’t have much choice. If it wants to be the first thing people associate with toys it really couldn’t afford to allow anyone else to own that domain, even in this economy.”

As a result of their $5.1 million investment, ToysRUs could be found at spots #1, #2 and #4 on Google (if you searched for the keyword TOYS).

A mere three weeks later, that’s no longer the case (clearly $5.1 million doesn’t last as long as it once did).

DomainNameWire is reporting (and a Google.com search for TOYS confirms) that Toys.com has been de-indexed by Google.

Why? What heinous crime did ToysRUs commit?

Simple — and sad really. Type in Toys.com and you’ll be forwarded to ToysRUs.com.

Makes perfect sense from a traditional marketing perspective: “they’re looking for toys, we’ll take them straight to us.”

Unfortunately, direct forwarding is a No No in the land of the search engines. Google and its cousins are looking to deliver search results that meet their customers’ needs — and that means site content that’s of significant merit, not merely acting as a pointer to another site.

As DomainNameWire noted, “the value of Toys ‘R’ Us’ $5.1M purchase of Toys.com has [now] been relegated to type-in traffic and potentially some of the inbound links to Toys.com.” That’s probably not exactly what the ToysRUs execs who okayed the $5.1 million bid had in mind.

Still, we probably shouldn’t be too surprised. Big companies, it turns out, aren’t too good at this Search Engine Optimisation stuff. In fact, the most recent study of the search skills of the Fortune 500 (”Natural Search Trends of the Fortune 500“, Q4 2008) by Conductor Inc. revealed that the 500 spend ten times as much every day as ToysRUs spent on its Toys.com acquisition — and with similar results.

The research reveals that:

• In Q4 2008 the Fortune 500 as a group spent approximately $51 million / day on 88,792 keywords – yet only 20.82% of these keywords rank in the top 100 natural search results.
• Only 1.41% of the domains (not companies) surveyed showed significant number of their terms in the top results. All of these positive domain scores were offset by other owned domains with significant visibility issues.
• 46.76% of Fortune 500 companies have very low or non-existent visibility for their most advertised keywords.

Not so good. Clearly a little more education is required on the subject of “Ye Ancient And Honorable Art Of The Search Engine”.

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