This article was originally published under Practical Ecommerce.
Those of you with school-age children may have been preoccupied with back-to-school, but now itโs time to start preparing your site for the holidays. The holiday shopping season is not that far off, so get on with implementing these traffic-building tips in order to achieve maximum search engine visibility.
Build Your Links
By acquiring a handful of links from high PageRank-endowed relevant sites, you will automatically enhance your siteโs worthiness in the eyes of the search engines. (PageRank is, on a logarithmic scale of 0 to 10, Googleโs importance score.) In my experience, a single link from a PageRank 8 homepage has significantly boosted rankings within several weeks. Itโs also worthwhile giving attention to existing inbound links where the anchor text is less than ideal (e.g. โclick hereโ or โvisit siteโ). If you can influence the text used in links by bloggers and business partners alike, you will profit in terms of additional rankings and traffic. Donโt forget to build your links slowly or you may raise red flags with Google and Yahoo!
Participate in the Blogosphere
Leverage the power of blogs for SEO. Itโs a great way to positively impact your siteโs traffic and readership. One key to success when blogging is to write posts frequently so that you have very few โgapsโ in time. A great time management technique is to load in prewritten, post-dated blog content into your blog software, such as WordPress, so that all of your blog posts arenโt clumped together.
Spend as much time commenting on the blogs of important bloggers in your industry as you spend writing for your own blog. That will help get you on the radar screen of these influencers. You can also generate positive buzz in the blogosphere by sending free product samples or review copies to these bloggers with โno strings attachedโ โ itโs a bad idea to try to buy bloggers off by sending them useless kitsch. Remember that bloggers can wreak havoc on reputations, so tread carefully.
If you donโt have time to blog yourself, you could try recruiting passionate customers as blog authors and run a group blog.
Re-Organize Your Internal Links
Your customers probably have different buying habits during the holiday season than they do at any other time of the year. Therefore, itโs common sense that you should modify your internal linking structure to reflect seasonality. Donโt trash your existing siteโs navigation, simply augment it with additional links containing keyword-rich anchor text, to create shortcuts that pass PageRank to your popular holiday categories and products. For example, if all of your holiday ornaments are three clicks away from your home page, create a text link on your home page that reads โChristmas ornamentsโ or โholiday ornaments.โ Donโt rely on links on your sitemap page or on footer links to achieve this; such links are less than ideal. Donโt go overboard in your homepage linking. Keep in mind that Googleโs Webmaster Guidelines advises you to keep the number of links on a page to fewer than 100.
Escape the Code Freeze
A common IT practice among mid to large size online merchants is to institute a โcode freeze,โ or site lockdown, during the holiday shopping season to minimize the potential for catastrophic errors and downtime. If your organization institutes a code freeze, you may not be able to make changes to your site for months. This means your on-page SEO effectively stagnates for an entire quarter. It also means you must race against the clock to implement SEO initiatives of any significance; and if you donโt make it in time, you must wait until the new year.
One way around this stress-inducing โtime crunchโ is to implement a third-party proxy platform. Such a system allows you to implement optimizations to the proxy throughout the holidays, quickly and easily, without impacting your native site.
Perhaps your code freeze still allows you to add static โlanding pagesโ during the holiday season. Thatโs better than nothing, but remember that it typically takes several weeks for new pages to make it into the search engines โ and during the holidays, time is of the essence. So, the sooner you can add links to these new pages, the better.
Wrap Your Gifts
With giveaways like โfree gift wrapโ and โfree shippingโ youโll attract holiday shoppers because youโre providing them with real value. Incorporate powerful messaging (e.g. โfree gift wrap,โ free shippingโ) into your Google snippets by adding them to meta description tags. Since hundreds of thousands of people search for phrases that include โgifts,โ you would do well to create a Gift Ideas page, optimize it, and place it one click away from your homepage to maximize its PageRank and give it the best opportunity to rank well.
Another way to โgiveโ during the holiday season is to offer gift certificates for the last-minute shopper. Feature gift certificates prominently on your site and cross-sell them on your โgiftsโ and โgift ideasโ pages to achieve maximum visibility. Start optimizing for gift certificate related search terms through featuring your gift certificates now, not just once the holiday season kicks into full swing.
