When it comes to SEO and your website many a search engine optimizer will argue that there should be no difference in what you should do. SEO is an activity which you should be engaged in all year round, not just at Christmas. No argument there but there are such things as human nature and a 24-hour day. As a website owner trying to run an online business you are being pulled at many different directions at once, which means that you realistically prioritise. Yes, you know SEO is important but so is getting stock in, dealing with clients, making sure bills are paid and all the other daily aspects of your online business.

 

This brings us to Christmas. The run-up to Christmas which starts the moment we get past the back-to-school period in September means that suddenly every website owner out there begins to frantically push their website, optimizing it to perform well for Christmas. As if that were not enough the sheer volume of online activity which goes on makes a hard job, harder. That’s why Christmas is such a pressured time when it comes to making sure your website is seen in the festive season. Add to this the fact that your likely prospects also feel the pressure and you begin to see why it is so critical to get things right.

 

Ideally, throughout the year you have been following the steps and guidelines detailed in my book, SEO Help, but if you haven’t there is no need to panic. There is still time to do six things which will really help your website perform better.

 

SEO Tip 1: Make sure you have content that is seasonal, compelling and as unique as you can make it. This is your first point of action and one you must make a priority. You need to sell your goods, services or products in a clear, compelling manner. Explain their unique selling points, what is it that makes your the ideal website to buy them from and why it is better than any of your competitors (stress positive rather than negative comparison points). Copy which is bullet point-driven, clear and relevant does well with search engines and (and this is crucial) also helps increase the conversion factor from visitors to customers.

 

SEO Tip 2: Think in pictures as well as words. When it comes to SEO this is a debatable point which many an optimizer will simply not even consider. It’s true pictures are largely invisible to search engines which means your website still needs to contain relevant, precise, unique content (see Tip 1 above) but pictures create an emotional response in those who see them. Whether it is a product you are selling or a service you are promoting the moment your visitors have an emotional response they are engaged which means that your text also works better in helping them make the right decision. Pictures are a must on your website today and a requirement when it comes to preparing it for Christmas.

 

SEO Tip 3: Minimise site loading time. Google recently introduced a filter in its algorithm which takes into account site loading times when it decides on the ranking of a website. This is because they take the same view as you should that the visitor experience is vital when it comes to online success and to have to wait ages for a website’s frontpage to load is not really conducive to that. Today there are many ways to make a site load faster and this is something you should be guiding your developers towards by checking on it and requesting improvements wherever it is possible.

 

SEO Tip 4: Optimise your product or service name and description fields. Yes, this is metatags and yes again Google totally discounts them which means that in terms of SEO value they are next to worthless and yet and yet, both product names and description fields affect how your site is seen by those searching for the product or service you are providing. The description they see and the text associated with it decide whether to click and go on your site or not. If your metatags (and you also need to look at your H1 and H2 headings) are working properly you will find that you also get more relevant traffic to your website and are gaining more conversions. For successful on-page optimization download and read through this Free on-page SEO eBook created especially to help you.

 

SEO Tip 5: Get links from other sites. I am not for a second here you start going in for link farms, bought links or even link exchanges. None of this will work and they will harm your site more than help it.  You do need, however, to work up alliances and use them to promote your site. Be creative here and proactive the same way you would be in any offline business.

 

SEO Tip 6: Get Technical. Use search engine friendly (SEF) URLs on your website. Talk to your developers and see if they can implement code which turns the long string of numbers at the end of the URL of your product pages and articles into something which is totally human readable.  This is something which has become more and more important for both search engines and human visitors. It helps in indexing, site ranking and the now all-important memorability factor from a site visitor point of view.

 

Employ these techniques on your website like yesterday and you will be in a much better position to capitalize on the online Christmas trade than last year.

 

 

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