This article was originally published under Practical Ecommerce.

As we enter into the holiday shopping season, it’s all hands on deck for merchants selling gift baskets. The Wisconsin specialist e-tailer Wisconsin Made is no exception. The challenge is to make an impact in what little time is left in the year. Search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t instantaneous; it takes time for changes on a site to get picked up by the search engine bots and get reflected in the search results.

Given how little time Wisconsin Made has, I’ll start with quick-hit opportunities that will make rapid improvements. That means optimizing the higher-level pages first; i.e., first the home page, then secondary pages, then tertiary pages. That also means focusing heavily on the highest weighted factors on a site: title tags and link text first. Body copy and URLs come after that. And meta tags don’t even enter into the picture.

Home Page Content

Starting at the home page, I see the title tag is targeting “gift baskets” and “gift ideas” as primary keywords. I’m all for lofty goals, but a page 1 ranking for either of these terms is just not realistic. Unless you’re somebody of the size and scale of Harry and David, you just need to move on.

Secondary Page Content

Overall there is a lot of opportunity to tweak the keyword focus on secondary level pages. Keywords that are not popular should be replaced (or augmented) with their more popular (but still relevant) counterparts. For example, “apparel” may be the industry term, but it’s not really part of the customer (searcher) vocabulary. “Clothing” or “clothes” would work much better.

Inbound Links and PageRank

Link building is slow going compared to on-page SEO, but that doesn’t mean give up on it completely until next year. True, it relies on webmasters across the web to react to your request or your “link bait” and add a link, and then Google has to discover the new link and recalculate PageRank, but it can be high impact. This is especially the case if the link points to a secondary page with that page’s keyword focus in the anchor text.

I noticed one “quick hit” link opportunity through the use of Linkscape. It’s an existing link that could be easily tweaked, and Wisconsin Made has influence over the folks who are doing the linking. It is a high-value link (according to Linkscape) on the News page of the vendor who built the Wisconsin Made website. The anchor text of this link is “Wisconsin Made.” It should be easy to persuade the vendor to change the anchor text to “Wisconsin Made Gifts” instead. This should improve the home page’s search rankings for a range of gift-related keywords.

Link baiting is always my favorite form of link building. Remember, the edgier you are, the more likely you are to attract attention and links. “The 10 Most Beautiful Wisconsin Parks” is good, but “Wisconsin’s 10 Worst Criminals” or “Wisconsin Jokes That Will Make You Blush” is better. It doesn’t have to be related to Wisconsin. It could be related to the holidays, such as “What Not to Get Your Teenager for Christmas” or “What Not to Get Your Crazy Mother-in-Law for Christmas.”

SEO Report Card

WisconsinMade.com

Home Page Content B

Inbound Links and PageRank B

Indexation A

Internal Hierarchical Linking Structure B-

HTML Templates and CSS B+

Secondary Page Content A-

Keyword Choices B-

Title Tags B

URLs B+

OVERALL GPA B+