Got some nice holiday paid search optimization tips in an email campaign from LookSmart. They started out stating the obvious, that the holidays are a crucial time. But here's a good stat to drive the point home: according to a WebTrends study, one out of five retailers surveyed by WebTrends said that the holiday season (October 1-December 31) accounts for 50% or more of their annual revenue.

Here are the tips they sent:

Add holiday keywords: Mix seasonal messaging with your brand to capitalize on how people search (e.g. holiday lawn decorations and Christmas sweaters).

Update copy: Make your regular copy compelling to holiday shoppers. According to Shopzilla's 2004 Online Holiday Scoop Study, half of online shoppers reported that "free shipping" was extremely or very important in selecting an online retailer when making a gift purchase. Once Christmas has come and gone, your work isn't through. Reach out to sale-shoppers to take advantage the post-holiday spike, see Hitwise data below.

Adjust keyword bids: Competitors bid aggressively during the holidays. Make sure you're getting the placement you want, but don't let the cost-per-click increase affect your ability to get real return on your ad spend. We suggest you track results down to a keyword-level.

Control spend: Use campaign tools to help predict and control spend.

Chart of weekly all sites market share in 'All Categories', based on visits.
Generated on 9/24/05. Copyright 2005 (c) 'Hitwise Pty Ltd.'

"In 2004, the trend in visits to the top 10 apparel sites increased substantially leading up to Christmas, experiencing a pre-holiday peak during the the week ending December 11. Additionally, there was a post-holiday peak during the week after Christmas, as shoppers went online to redeem holiday gift cards, spend gift money or take advantage of post-holiday sales. This shows that the holiday season online ends not the week before Christmas, as would be expected, but the first week in January."
--LeeAnn Prescott, Senior Research Analyst, Hitwise

Reports are coming in that "Google bombing" doesn't really work any more. Specifically, the theory is that now at least one of the words in the hyperlink text has to appear on the page being linked to, for the Google bomb to still be effective. But if that's the case, why is George W. Bush's bio page on whitehouse.gov still #1 for "miserable failure" in Google? I scoured his page for the word "miserable" and the word "failure" and found neither one! ;-) Look here and you'll see that Google couldn't find the words either.

In any event, do bear in mind that focusing all your search optimization efforts on offpage factors and neglecting the onpage factors as well won't bode well for your Google positions, I'm sure of that. And if you've hired an SEO firm that's overly focused on the linkbuilding and not giving any attention to fixing your website's search engine unfriendliness, you should probably reevaluate your decision.