Image by atomische via Flickr.

For marketers in the digital space, 2009 was a whirlwind year. Twitter took off amid a social surge, Yahoo! and Microsoft partnered up in search and Google gobbled up a litany of companies. During this time we’ve used our blog to cut through the headlines and share insights into what the year’s top stories mean for marketers. Look to Digital Connections for more of this in 2010.

Below you’ll find our most widely-read posts of the year (we’ve recently counted down the top five on Twitter, for those of you who follow us there).

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One way to effectively mix SEO and PPC: Stay ahead of the curve and utilize new innovations that enable you to weave micro-formats and RSS feeds into search listings.

In an iMedia Connection article published today, Mike Dobbs — Group Director, SEO at 360i — outlines 10 tips for combining SEO & paid search in your digital marketing programs. We’ve provided a brief summary below, but you can read the full article over on iMedia’s Web site.

While search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search are often seen as independent processes by digital marketers, the consumer sees a search results page as a single experience, and research shows that paid and natural search do impact eachother. Here’s a look at 10 key force-multipliers that leverage search results pages to maximize the impact of both your PPC and SEO efforts:

1. Follow proven SEO best practices
There are many standard best practices, but avoiding duplicate content is a vital SEO rule for retailers. Duplicate content is a term used in the field of search engine optimization to describe content that appears on more than one webpage. Embracing the “canonical tag” is an elegant solution for avoiding duplicate content.

2. Evaluate your paid search campaign structure against your own site architecture
Following your site’s architecture when setting up your campaigns and ad groups can help reveal untapped opportunities for your paid search efforts. Do you have an ad group for each of your product categories and promotions? Walk through your site map and compare it against your PPC campaign to make sure you cover all the bases.

3. Take a holistic approach to PPC bidding and ad creative
Running paid ads that include timely promotions and a call-to-action alongside natural search results for your brand can actually increase overall click-through rates (CTRs) on natural search listings, providing higher ROI across your search efforts.

Results of a SearchIgnite study showed that natural search clicks were 17 percent higher on days when paid search ads were running, garnering more “free” clicks simply by running paid search ads alongside natural search results. In addition, total conversions and revenue on both paid and natural terms dramatically increased on days when paid search ads were running.

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Google has launched a new experimental feature in Google Labs that searches your social circle in addition to your regular Google search results. Announced at Web 2.0 in San Francisco last week, Google Social Search is currently in its Beta testing phase.

What Will Social Search Pull?

Greatly impacted by Google’s announcement last week of their search partnership with Twitter , Social Search culls the following data from your Social Circle.

• Twitter feeds
• Google profiles (namely Picasa and Blogger)
• FriendFeed
• Your own Google Reader feeds

According to Google, your Social Circle is made of:

• Contacts from Gmail and Gchat
• People you are publicly connected to on other social sites (Twitter and Friendfeed for now)
• Publicly shared content of friends of friends
• Feeds you follow on Google Reader

The social graph is an increasingly familiar online model. It represents the amplification and diffusion of a message through a user’s friend network.

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With the latest Google search announcement of its BETA Caffeine engine, what can marketers expect if Google flips a switch or starts a transition to a newer “next-generation” infrastructure?

Now that Google’s sandbox beta engine has stabilized – it was previously too volatile to run comprehensive and accurate testing – we’ve evaluated rankings for a sample set of 40 retail keywords. We looked at ten major retail brand names (keywords), ten retail head terms (single keywords), ten retail torso terms (two-word phrases) and ten retail long-tail phrases (four-word phrases) and compared the search results on the first three pages of both engines (standard Google and “Caffeinated” Google).

40 Retail Keywords Used in the Analysis

Six things stood out to us as notable differences that could impact marketers when Google makes the switch.

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Google’s Matt Cutts recently said the nofollow SEO technique will no longer be as effective.

This week at SMX Advanced, Google’s high-profile head of Webspam and liaison to search marketers worldwide, Matt Cutts, pulled the rug out from under SEOs and Webmasters everywhere when he suggested that a previously sanctioned search optimization technique heavily relied upon by many site optimizers would not be supported in the same way. In short, he stated that the nofollow attribute that is considered helpful in preventing spam and even sculpting a site’s PageRank would no longer be as effective.

Who does this affect?
Because the active use of nofollow is a more advanced SEO effort, this change won’t affect the majority of search optimizers. However, the popular blogging platform WordPress (used by this blog) uses nofollow on links left by commenters, so every WordPress blogger is potentially affected.

Google has long recommended the use of nofollow when linking to content excluded via various exclusion protocols; Webmasters who have followed Google’s guidelines are now up a creek. And finally, advanced SEOs who use nofollow links to sculpt their PageRank will certainly be scrambling to modify their sites.

More on the nofollow attribute, how it’s used and the impact this news will have on PageRank follows here.

For Searchers

Google recently launched a suite of new search options. Googlers will now see a new “Show Options” link after completing a search query. At the moment, it’s a fairly subtle gateway into their additional tools, providing searchers with a way to further segment relevance off an original search keyword.

The options available break down into two types – 1) options that help searchers segment and further filter results to find what they’re looking for and 2) options that help searchers visualize the keyword results in different ways.

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Last week, author Rebecca Lieb managed to distill her new book “The Truth about Search Engine Optimization,” from 51 chapters into a single truth. How can she top that? In the continuation of the interview, she first addresses what truth means in this context. Then she tackles the biggest SEO myth. She closes with answering a few questions submitted via Twitter, but I didn’t limit her response to 140 characters. Read the full article