Christmas SEO
By Sarah Dam, in Web Strategy, Web Development, Web Marketing
Summer is nearly upon us, the department stores are already displaying their Christmas decorations in store. You may have thought about your gift shopping or you may have thought about Christmas products, promotions or content for your website. Something you should definitely be considering is Christmas-inspired search engine optimisation.
Google, Yahoo and MSN searches account for around 93% of searches carried out in Australia and this is by the estimated 14,663,622 Australians who have internet access. 42% of Australians have made purchases online and pre-season last year, online spending by Australians was tipped to reach A$1.2 billion in the run up to Christmas.
Search Engines Simplified
Search engines:
- Catalogue/index web pages
- Accurately assess the key topic of each page
- Display a link to your website in matching search results pages
What is Search Engine optimisation (SEO)
SEO is the process of improving your website so that it can be:
- Navigated with ease by search engine crawlers
- Analysed correctly for the key topic of the web page
- Listed accurately and at a prominent position in the search engine results pages (SERPs)
If you would like to attract some of the Christmas internet traffic it is essential you start getting your website ready immediately with some Christmas-specific search engine optimisation or general on-page optimisation.
This article will give you a quick run-down on how you can do some quick optimisation yourself. If you’d like professional SEO advice, please give me (Sarah) a call on 1300 554 891. We’re going to start off by doing some research on your current website:
Research
Let’s first check how many of your website pages are indexed by the most common search engines by using Get Started’s free SEO tool - Indexed Pages. The search results will be the number of pages that the search engine has found and indexed by crawling your website.
As long as at least your home page is listed any page with a simple link from the home page will be found by search engines. If you do not have any pages listed it is worth contacting Get Started about our Submit product. Submit includes tailored submission of your website to the most popular and effective search engines to increase the spread of your search engine marketing.
Now that we know if the search engines know about your website, let’s see how you rank! Get Started has developed a report (that is FREE for a limited time) that will provide you with your rankings in the top 3 search engines. The Rank Report includes:
- Why Search engine marketing is important to your website
- Current website ranking
- How to get better results for your website
- Ways we can increase traffic through your website
Optimise
So we’ve done the research and you’ve realised that your website could be doing quite a bit better in the search engine results pages (SERPs). To quickly optimise a page of your website for Christmas traffic you need to start by editing pages to focus on Christmas-related search phrases. What are your clients or customers going to be searching for at this time of year? Maybe “Christmas Gifts” or “End of year sales”? Try editing your pages to include this content and ensure the keywords or phrases are in the headings and page title of your pages.
Remember that the content of the page must appeal to the visitor as well as search engines, there is no point attracting a customer to your website if they are going to be turned off by what they find there or if it is not related to their search.
Online shopping features most sought after by most consumers are:
- 90% - Free Shipping
- 81% - Discounts to Frequent Shoppers
- 77% - Tracking on purchases
- 62% - Published Privacy Policy
- 51% - Received a High Rating from an independent source
A simple text link from the home page or in the menu will be enough to alert search engines that you have a Christmas section ready to go and get it indexed. You should include key phrases in this link, such as "Christmas specials”, ”Christmas gift wrapping" or "Pre-order in time for Christmas" if you do not want to use the term Christmas you might want to advertise an end of year sale or cheap items. Not everyone celebrates Christmas, but a lot of people in Australia look forward to the end of year sales.
Getting related websites to link to you will drive more traffic to your site at any time of the year, including at this time when people are ready and willing to spend money online.
It is important to find websites to link to yours with themes or topics that are related to your website theme. Search engines will give higher value to the relevant links rather than off-topic links. Links from credible and topic-related websites also bring you highly targeted visitor traffic directly and help you increase your own credibility. Websites linking to yours should be popular with the search engines, have high Google PageRank and be ranked high by search engines. To see how many pages currently link to your website use Get Started’s SEO Tool - Inbound Links.
Never try to trick a search engine in any way as they can recognise when they are being exploited, and if found out, your web page may be banned from the search.
After you have created your page you can choose to analyse it with Get Started’s Report Product. See where your page is currently ranked and what elements influence this ranking. Gain our expert advice on optimising these elements to improve your ranking and drive more traffic, or more effective traffic to your website. Report includes:
- Current ranking
- On page optimisation audit
- Advice tailored to your website and current optimisation
Basic Christmas Search Engine Optimisation in Summary:
- Make sure your website is indexed by the top 3 search engines
- Create a special page for the holiday season using words or phrases that a user might search for
- Link to the new page from your home page or other already indexed page using a text link describing the page contents
- Acquire inbound links to your website from related websites
The above basic optimisation is a very brief description of how you can optimise a page yourself. Thorough optimisation includes:
- Detailed research into the selection of key words or phrases, using a formula that analyses how successful a phrase will be by the amount of searches and competing website
- Inclusion of these in elements of your website such as meta tags, image alternative text and titles, page links, headings, titles, web addresses and at the correct density and position in your content.
- Well planned source code output, with as little code as necessary to affect key phrase density
- Optimisation of navigation such as menus and site maps
- Continued analysis and fine tuning
If you require serious search engine optimisation of your website Get Started’s Optimise product is what you need. It includes all of the best features of our other search engine marketing services and products as well as maintenance of your website to increase your results, with continuing care, maintenance and communication.
- Current ranking
- On page analysis
- Maintenance of website elements highlighted in analysis
- On going updates to keep you ahead of the game
Whatever the holidays mean to you, enjoy the summer and let your website work for itself. You can view all of Get Started’s SEO products here.
Sources