Earlier this year, Arbor Networks took a moment to consider the idea of Google as an ISP, and determined that the search giant would actually be the third-largest carrier in the world. Now Arbor Networks has revisited the concept, and it believes Google’s moved up a step in the rankings.

Craig Labovitz, who holds the title “Chief Scientist” at Arbor Networks, explained how that’s possible in a blog post. After discussing the company’s financial achievements, he wrote, “This month, Google broke an equally impressive Internet traffic record – gaining more than 1% of all Internet traffic share since January.”

Labovitz also wrote, “Google now represents an average 6.4% of all Internet traffic around the world. This number grows even larger (to as much as 8-12%) if I include estimates of traffic offloaded by the increasingly common Google Global Cache (GGC) deployments and error in our data due to the extremely high degree of Google edge peering with consumer networks.”

Google Internet Traffic

Those are some rather stunning statistics. It’s hard to imagine that any one company could be responsible for so much traffic worldwide. And it’s even harder to believe a company could both pull that off and still be growing.

The findings do create some interesting possibilities where Google and its experimental ultra high-speed broadband networks are concerned, though.

Perhaps what Arbor Networks found should have some of the world’s top ISPs looking over their shoulders every now and then.

You can look at the tourism industry and get a feel for the problems companies of all kinds are facing in terms of social media engagement every day. I just sat in on a session at BlogWorld aimed at such companies, but the themes were much broader – how to filter though all the noise of the web to find discussions about your brand, ways to harness the social media tools that are available to us to actually get some use out of them, how to use different kinds of search engines to engage with people, etc.

When businesses think of search marketing, they tend to think about things like SEO and paid search, but there is another critical element of search – monitoring. You want to monitor your brand using search engines, and while reputation management certainly plays into this, it’s not just about reputation management, it’s about finding where people are talking about your brand and finding ways to engage with them. This not only humanizes your brand (a theme we’ve discussed a lot recently, based on various talks from the Inbound Marketing Summit), but can also help you be there for people when they need you. The conversations that are happening really dictate the solution that it is your duty to provide.

Search Marketing Isn't Just SEO and PPC

“Good listening is really no more than good search engine skills,” as Sheila Scarborough of Tourism Currents put it.

Let’s start with Twitter. This is essentially where the conversation in the session started anyway. Twitter isn’t just a place for you to tell people what you’re up to. There are plenty of practical uses for that aspect of the service too, but it’s also a search engine. A powerful search engine (even more powerful as of the last several weeks) that lets you tap into what people are saying about your brand in real time, which means you can assist them (or yourself) in real time as well.

The easiest way to do this in an effective manner is to set up a dashboard like TweetDeck, HootSuite, Seesmic, etc. – something that will give you different panels or columns to monitor searches for different keywords/phrases that pertain to your brand.

Now, you have the root of the conversation(s) in front of you. The next step is engagement, and like Ann Peavey of Seattle CVB said, personality is a tool to grab people’s attention. Have meaningful and helpful conversations with people that are already talking about your brand, whether they begin on a positive or negative note.

Next, you have traditional search engines – Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. Google was the focal point, and should probably be a focal point for most businesses, considering the enormous share of the search market it retains. On an interesting side note, when they asked for a show of hands for people who use Bing, nobody raised their hands. I’m not suggesting you ignore Bing. In fact, highly recommend the opposite, especially with Windows Phone 7 making its debut, but Google is probably the best place to start. However, we’re not just talking about Google web search, it’s about using all of Google’s different search engines to find discussions (Google Video, YouTube, Blog Search, News, etc.). Don’t ignore Images either. As Scarborough and Peavey pointed out, a lot of people communicate through images. People post pictures all over the web. You might consider monitoring Google Images, Flickr, etc.

Facebook Search should also be considered part of the monitoring package, especially as the company looks to get more integrated with search in general. Searching on Facebook itself will return people, places, groups, etc. – all potential sources of conversation about your brand. Now that’s not all going to be public, and there’s not much you can do about that, but it won’t hurt to see what’s out there. Much of this is likely to become a great deal more visible thanks to things like the new deal between Facebook and Bing. I wonder how many of those people who didn’t raise their hands as Bing users will be reconsidering as a result of that.

Becky McCray (also of Tourism Currents) was talking with one of the audience members about deploying a social strategy. The fact of the matter is that there’s no silver bullet solution to this problem. A lot of it comes down to scale. How much discussion is out there about your brand on a daily basis? How much time needs to be spent to effectively engage with that all? It’s going to vary by business size, products, and other variables. One thing that is clear is that it’s worth the time, so if you need someone dedicated to this full-time, than that’s what it takes. If you need a team of people, than that’s what it takes. It’s probably a good idea to start with one person and let them build a team as needed.

Good SEO is about a lot of things- you should make sure your website is well-designed to be easy to navigate (for humans and search engines), eliminate duplicate content, intelligently internally link, convince nice people to link to you, do smart keyword research, and make sure to actually use those keywords in your meta data, page titles, and URLs. But that’s all so…easy. Tasks like these might make up the definition of search engine optimization, but SEOs who are dedicated to the practice of SEO that only considers how to play search engines are the reason that so many people badmouth SEO. It doesn’t have to be that way. SEO, for someone who cares about the long-term fate of a website and the real value of that site, is a much more inclusive concept. And the beauty of thinking of SEO in this more expansive way is: it gives you more stuff to do. You’re not confined by the boundaries of “traditional SEO”, and you can be more innovative in getting yourself- or your clients- value from a website, and at giving more value to your visitors. Everyone is happy, and when everyone likes you better, you’re going to have more success online.

There are a lot of ways to consider the value you’re offering visitors now and improve upon it, and some of them are so simple that there’s really no excuse not to integrate them into your SEO strategy. If your site is all basic-SEO-optimized up and you’re thinking “what a great job I did”, then: too bad. You’ve got so far to go, but don’t worry: this is the fun part. You always have to keep in mind all of the SEO basics, but once your site is tidy, it’s time to look into making it cool. And this is how.

1. Give the people what they want

You surely have analytics data. If you don’t, you need to get some ASAP. Determine where people are entering your site, and with which keywords, and what they’re doing when they get there, and when they’re leaving. Analyzing this data is like a little treasure hunt. Who’s getting what they want? Who isn’t? Can you figure out what you’re not offering them? You can also use the questions people are asking when they contact you to form the basis of additional information you need to be providing.

Analytics, and your own visitors’ queries, are a great place to get ideas for:

Website Optimizer tests- Test the various value propositions you’re offering to your audience, and let them tell you what they want to see.

New content for current pages- Address the unanswered questions that come up frequently!

New pages- if you offer something and it’s not apparent to people that you offer it, that…is bad. This is one of the best ways to expand your reach into a whole new group of keywords you’ve never ranked for before, and increase your website’s usefulness for your visitors as well.

2. Ask the industry

No industry is static, and that’s why you can’t optimize a site once and say done. The pace of change will vary from industry to industry, but everywhere, new terminology, trends, news, advances, and scandals will occur. It’s going to happen, and you need to make sure you stay knowledgeable about it in order to update your keywords and content to stay relevant.

Talk to the client- If you’re working for a client website rather than your own industry, it’s important to touch base frequently about what’s going on, and how those occurrences can be integrated into your site content.

Add an industry events calendar to your site- Especially if you, or your client, attend events frequently, you can list industry events and mention your attendance, which is fantastic both because it tends to be easy to rank for conference and event names, exposing you to a large industry audience for branding purposes, and because it lets people know they can find you there for personal interaction.

Add an industry news section to your site- This is a great way, if you are not in the industry of the site you’re optimizing, to keep apprised of what’s going on and identify new areas for keyword and content targeting. It’s also useful, if you just write small summaries of each news item, as a way to integrate a variety of relevant industry terms onto your site.

3. Give people a chance to interact

Social media etc. etc. etc. – there are a ton of ways to interact with your audience now. Pick a social media platform or two that you can be dedicated to, let people tell you what they want, and be willing to respond by giving it to them or telling them why you have a better alternative.

4. Don’t forget your roots

Local SEO- If you’re a business with a local presence- whether you’re targeting a nationwide or worldwide audience or not- it’s usually silly to ignore your hometown business. They’re right there. Local SEO isn’t just the same as more widely-targeted SEO efforts, but it can be done in conjunction with them, and a lot of the things you can do- from opening a Google Local Business center account to integrating local keywords and an address on your site- are so straightforward it will probably cost you more to ignore them than execute them.

The SEO game is never over: there’s always a way to be better, and the key to long-term success is to keep reaching for it.

Google is retiring the Google Advertising Professionals (GAP) program, and replacing it with the new Google AdWords Certification program.

“We’ve had a lot of great feedback from agencies and today we’re announcing changes designed to offer them better training and more rigorous certification in AdWords proficiency, and to lower costs for those who help advertisers get the most out of AdWords,” says Penry Price, Vice President, Global Agency Development at Google. “We’re also making it easier for advertisers to find certified agency partners to work with them on digital advertising.”

Features of the new training program include:

- New training materials to help agencies better understand recent changes in search marketing and AdWords functionality, available via webinar series, learning center, or on-site training at Google

- More challenging certification exams to test practical application of knowledge and best practices (rather than simple recall of knowledge)

- Advanced-level exams to highlight competency in search, display, reporting and analysis

- A redesigned Certified Partner badge, which includes a “Click to Verify” element so advertisers can view the partner’s profile page for additional information.

Google has also launched Google Partner Search, which a directory that pairs advertisers with Certified Partners, as well as new AdWords API pricing.

Although the “thud” wasn’t verified until this afternoon, it seems that an online giant fell a couple of days ago. According to new data from Hitwise, Facebook managed to beat Google in terms of visits between March 7th and March 13th, becoming the most visited website in the U.S. for the week.

The graph visible below makes the changeup pretty clear (blame the sloppy enlarged bit on us, not Hitwise). What’s more, it doesn’t look like Facebook’s going to relinquish its lead anytime soon.

Facebook Unseats Google As Most-Visited Site

Heather Dougherty explained, “The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame.”

Then here’s one more interesting fact, courtesy of Dougherty: “Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week.”

Anyway, this development represents a major win for Facebook. The ability to represent the social network as the number one site should count for a lot as corporate representatives talk to advertisers and investors, and could result in a direct boost in revenue. A further snowball effect in terms of user interest might occur, too, since most people like to be part of something that’s popular.

Have you seen possible Caffeine effects in use? Tell us about it.

Back before the holidays, Google made it a point to assure everybody that Caffeine would not be rolled out (except for at one data center) until after the holidays were over – January at the earliest. The reason for this was that Google didn’t want to shake everything up during a key time for businesses (they didn’t want a repeat of the Florida update).

The company let everyone know about its intentions at PubCon in November. In fact, a few days ago, Google’s Matt Cutts posted a video running through his presentation from that event on his blog. He also provided the slideshow. It covers much more than just Caffeine, but if you missed it, you may want to consider watching it anyway (Caffeine discussion starts at about 22:10 in the video and at slide 29 in the presentation).

“It’s a re-write of our indexing infrastructure. It’s taking the old way that we used to index things that we’d crawled around the web, and we’re replacing that with new architecture that’s fresh and that had been written to be more scalable, more flexible, [with] the ability to attach different types of data, and in the process of indexing, the ability to do more documents for a more comprehensive version of the web, and the ability to do it faster,” Cutts says of Caffeine.

But enough background. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a WebmasterWorld forum thread where administrator Tedster claimed to have seen Caffeine in action at a number of IP addresses. He wrote:

I’m seeing the Caffeine data-set being served via this set of IP addresses: 64.233.169.147, 64.233.169.105, 64.233.169.103, 64.233.169.104, 64.233.169.99,64.233.169.106

It seems to take 5 IP addresses to build the complete SERP, where in the past it often took only 3.

Schwartz also pointed to another member’s post (Whitenight), who said:

Well, just tripled checked with offices/employees in Texas, Colorado, and Indiana. All 5 “control” keywords/sites showed live Caffeine.

That member’s latest post says that the Caffeine Dataset is also on http://66.102.7.99 and http://66.102.7.104.

We don’t know for sure if this is all really Caffeine in action though. Google hasn’t commented on it, and has not made any announcements regarding Caffeine since what Matt said above. Some people don’t believe this is Caffeine at all. As Schwartz notes, we’ll have to wait for Google to say something.

Still, January is almost over, and Google said it would wait until after the holidays, specifically mentioning the month of January. It’s about time for this to be rolling out to some extent. Speed has been emphasized a significant amount in Caffeine discussion, and Cutts told us that page speed would likely become a ranking factor. Regardless of whether or not you are witnessing Caffeine in action yet, rest assured that it will be here sooner or later, and any edge you can give yourself in the meantime is for the good of your own site’s performance. Speed will not only supposedly help you in search going forward, but it just makes for a better user experience.