Read on for more details about the AMA Hot Topic Series day’s sessions.

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One is always a little cautious about postulating grand theories into the wide world. But after studying over 1 million unique unbranded keywords across 25 major retailer search programs, we couldn’t resist - referring to the concept we outline as “Page Yield Theory.” This is an underpinning notion that the “long tail” of unbranded search keyword traffic is inextricably linked to the website’s number of uniquely indexable site pages. To those of us who subscribe to the “every-page-should-sing-its-own-song” philosophy, that seems like an obvious statement.

Yet the challenge behind it, and the impetus for the research, arose from the fact that many (unoptimized) well-branded multichannel retailers have 10’s/100’s of thousands of unique and indexed website pages. However most of their natural search traffic (usually over 90%) comes from searches related to their own company name. How could such strong brands and massive websites produce such little traffic for generic terms, terms other than the company name?

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Most of the major SEOs and top companies keep such figures as closely-guarded secrets. Even the search engines keep the numbers of searches by various keywords secret, using various techniques to hide actual values.

The much-touted Eye Tracking Study conducted by Enquiro and Did-It show that the first listings on Google SERPs are looked at and clicked upon the most by users. Most pros already concluded this through common sense, but it’s difficult to get actual traffic amounts associated with the rankings of listings on SERPs.

I’m going to change this situation right here, right now, thanks to new data that Google has graciously begun providing to the public, and thanks to a brief reshuffling of rankings on a top keyword for one of the sites that I manage. Read on, and I’ll elaborate.

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What a gift it would be to possess photographic “peripheral memory”. Imagine being able to “remember” and explore conversations in full detail that you weren’t actually paying attention to when they occured.

Welcome to desktop search — Google desktop search, in particular. This will be a game changer for natural search optimization. For retailers, desktop search means all of a sudden, you’re playing the search game - whether by purpose or by accident.

With Google Desktop installed, any web page that your visitors have accessed, or any email they have received in their Outlook inbox (or web-based email clients like Hotmail or Yahoo mail), is now fodder for ANY future Google search they do. More importantly, those pages are given top-position on the page for keyword matches that may be - and this is the critical point - completely unrelated to what the customer was looking for when they originally visited that web page. Forget photographic memory. Peripheral memory is here.

For Google desktop users, this means that whether you intend it or not, your site and emails are already “indexed” for them by virtue of their viewing those pages. This provides the unfair advantage, the ultimate shortcut to the top of the Google results pile. No site restructuring or bloody IT battles. Just leveraging your existing customer traffic! Your mission is to make sure your copy, links, headings and titles are appropriately keyworded, in order to show up as more relevant than the OTHER sites that are in Google Desktop’s cache.

Adoption is still low. But as it grows Google Desktop (and other desktop search engines), raise the stakes for search engine optimization to keep drawing traffic. It will affect not only your web site, but your email campaigns which will also need to be carefully constructed to target the right keywords. This will enable retailers to extend the shelf life of campaigns and maximize repeat-traffic potential of existing customer visitors for months after they have forgotten about you.

Customers have better things to do than think about you all day long. Google desktop helps them “remember” things about you — things that they never even knew.

However, I have to say after using it, I’m not real impressed. The main problem I have with it is that I just don’t find their data to be believable. Too many discrepencies, too many gaps. Let me show you some specifics…

For starters, witness a huge spike in searches for “Christmas shopping” mid-year. Then it’s relatively flat during the Christmas buying season?!? This next one leaves me totally incredulous: no activity whatsoever throughout the year for the search term “holiday shopping” except April, May, and, to a lesser extent, December. Finally, for the very popular search term “shopping,” the month of April appears to have been totally lost.

So, although the PrioritySubmit tool sounds good in theory, until their data starts looking a lot more credible, I’ll be relying on WordTracker, Overture’s Search Term Suggestion Tool, and Google’s Keyword Sandbox for studying keyword popularity with search engine users. (In case you’re curious, according to Overture’s tool, keyword searches across Yahoo! and the rest of Overture’s network during the month of October for “Christmas shopping” was 13985, for “holiday shopping” was 2751, and for “shopping” was 2273098.)