In the dog days of summer, it might seem a little early to start thinking about the holiday shopping season. It might, unless you're a member of Shop.org.

The trade association for online retailers this afternoon held a Webinar with experts from the industry offering advice for Internet merchants trying to make the best of the busiest shopping season in a year that has offered little in the way of hopeful economic indicators.

But the economy really began its nosedive in earnest last October, so retailers at least have the benefit of experience in dealing with a holiday season amid this recession.

"Where last year retailers were having to deal with a great unknown, this year we have some experience dealing with a pretty tough environment and we should use that to our advantage," said Fiona Swerdlow, Shop.org's head of research.

The association recently released a report based on its survey of online retailers describing their experiences last holiday season. Among its findings was the positive sign that key metrics like shopping cart abandonment and e-mail conversion rates had held relatively steady from the previous year.

"In the economic times we're living through, staying level and not dipping is not to be sneezed at," Swerdlow said.

Speakers at today's Webinar offered their perspectives on various pillars of the online retailer world, ranging from marketing to customer service and merchandising. Even though it's just early August, they stressed that retailers should already be well underway with the marketing and planning activities for the holiday season.

"We really start our holiday push in July," said Michael Griffin, the founder and CTO of Adlucent, a marketing firm that counts many large retailers as clients.

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Griffin spoke of the importance of attaching target metrics to individual keywords when calibrating a search campaign. He also counseled retailers to bid on keywords for specific products rather than just broad categories, what he called the "long tail" of the search marketing strategy.

"A small percentage of your products are going to drive a majority of your revenue," Griffin said. "One of the biggest opportunities that we have seen drive tens of millions of dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue is building out search campaigns so that they cover your best-performing products."

A different playing field

Given that marketers' budgets are likely more constrained this year than most, that long tail approach demands a good understanding of which handful of products among a retailer's inventory will account for the lion's share of holiday sales.

To that end, Griffin recommended a predictive, "forward-looking" approach to managing a keyword bidding campaign.

"One of the keys is to predict which of your products is going to do well in paid search and focus your efforts there," he said.

And how to do that? The Web goes both ways these days, so he urged retailers to keep an eye on consumer-generated ratings and reviews. "Make sure you're advertising the products that your customers are already raving about," he said.

Andrea Gulli, vice president of e-commerce for New York & Company, advised retailers to coordinate their merchandising planning with their search campaigns to ensure that the products they spend their ad dollars promoting are in stock when the customers start clicking through.

Almost in chorus, the presenters emphasized the importance of staking an early claim to the holiday season, even if it's long before consumers are even thinking about buying Christmas presents. For Gulli, the value for retailers of positioning themselves as holiday destinations in mid-October materializes several weeks later, when shoppers are finally getting to work on their lists, those shops are already associated with the holidays in their mind.

"It's human nature to wait until the last minute," she said. "It's okay if your consumers do it, but don't you do it."

The presenters also noted the changing face of customer service in the digital age. Service reps fielding questions from shoppers trying to make purchases on a mobile device, for instance, should have Blackberrys and iPhones and other handset models in the call center so they can see for themselves what the Web site they're trying to troubleshoot looks like on the mobile Web.

The increasingly social nature of the Web is also throwing a wrinkle into what might be considered traditional customer service. As companies continue to mull the best strategy to build a presence on sites like Facebook and Twitter, their customers are already there. That means that from a service and reputation standpoint, retailers are well advised not to ignore those channels.

But service and reputation, as important as they may be, don't always equate with direct sales. Stripping away the hype around sites like Twitter, social media remains a sidelight as a sales channel, Griffin said. Ditto for mobile.

"I don't see in mobile or social media a lot of great examples of it driving immediate revenue," he said. "I think there's a great opportunity with social and mobile to focus on it as a customer service vehicle."