Start planning your Christmas SEO now

If all you want for Christmas is better Google rankings for your main keywords, you ought to be asking Santa now.

Unbearable as it might seem, the Xmas shopping season starts in October. It can take months before Google rewards a well optimised page so depending on your current rankings, you should be planning and even implementing your search engine optimisation now.

What do you need to do to prepare for Christmas SEO?

1. Research your keywords. Keyword trends change so even if you’ve got a campaign in place, it’s always worth checking for new phrases and changes in searches.

2. Analyse your current webstats. Where’s your traffic coming from? What proportion is via the search engines and what keywords result in sales, enquiries or longer visits?

3. Check your Google Webmaster Tools account. If you haven’t got one, it’s easy and free - just open a free Google account, click on the Tools icon, generate the line of code that Google needs and place it on your home page - Google gives you clear instructions. Webmaster Tools shows you how well Google has indexed your pages and what keywords it associates with your content. If there’s a gap between your target keywords and those that Google is indexing you against, you’ve got some work to do.

4. Start developing ideas for content that people will want to share.  This could be anything from simple ‘How to..’ (like this blog post) to new product launches, something humorous or special offers. Sharing content is a big deal on the web - the more people want to reference you in their blogs, bookmarks and social media accounts, the more traffic and links you’ll get.

5. Check Google Trends - what keywords do people use before Christmas? ‘Sofa’ purchases for example, tend to increase before and after Christmas. Are you clear about which of your products people will want pre-Christmas and have you got your images and content sorted?

I hate to be the first to say it but Happy Christmas 2010!

Why having a well written blog can do wonders for your Google rankings.

1. Blog software allows you to create structured content around your keyword themes. This makes it easier to algorithmically categorise content. If you can make it easier for search engines to understand your content, you have a much better chance of ranking well on those topics.

2. Typically, blog software creates search friendly URLs – instead of having a URL a mile long with a string of unintelligible characters, you can have your website address followed by a simple description of what’s on the page - eureka!

3. You can create ‘keyword rich’ internal links. If you blog about your products or services, you can link to product information or purchase pages deep within your website. This enhances the importance of the pages to which you link and is particularly useful for ranking in Google on long tail phrases.

4. You can attract inbound links. Bloggers like to link to each other – much more than webmasters. Blogs are great for posting to social news and social media websites. Text, audio and video are all easily supported for syndication by blogs.

5. Provided that you write good content on a reasonably frequent basis, blogs help you to create fresh content quickly and easily. Readers and search engine crawlers will come back to you, creating a virtuous circle - the more content you give the search engines, the more findable you become and the more credible you appear. Content suggests knowledge.

6. RSS feeds - mmm, once upon a time RSS was next the next big thing. Trouble is, it still is or might be, depending on your view. The SEO advantage is that you can get links back to you from the syndicated content taken by other sites.

7. Interaction - comments and ‘pings’ in blog software encourage interaction. If your blog attracts input and comments from other bloggers, you’ll get the kind of annotated and contextually relevant links that search engines typically reward in the rankings. And if you’re good enough to develop a loyal following, you’ll get plugged on other blogs, in forums and at conferences and within the comments of your blog.

I tendered for a contract via the Competefor site earlier and the question of risks and challenges of search engine optimisation and search engine marketing arose. The buyer also wants to pay by performance in terms of traffic generated - so here’s how we responded.

Dealing first with the challenges and risks of an SEO contract.

Typically there’s a substantial gap between where the client’s site ranks now in Google etc and where they want to be. Bridging that gap can involve challenges such as:

- restructuring the site’s navigation architecture
- cleaning up untidy code (a significant part of SEO is about enabling Google to index content quickly and accurately)
- taking on well established competition (analysing why their sites are ranked higher is relatively simple but overtaking them involves a well structured plan and rigorous execution
- working with IT people who may, understandably, be suspicious of external techs and protective of their own work
- avoiding triggering Google’s spam filters by doing too much too quickly to get instant results.

Working on the basis of pay by traffic performance has one serious flaw - the SEO company can’t control the total volume of searches in any given market. Traffic volumes vary according to factors such as season, topicality and the economy. The SEO company can build its client’s share of that market but it can’t dictate the size of the market.

Moving onto SEM or paid search (pay-per-click advertising or PPC), the main risks are associated with the cost of clicks and how to keep them low. This is a function of several things including bidding strategy, well written ads that attract clicks, landing page content (Google has an algorithm that assesses your “Quality Score” - a figure driven by click through rates, click backs from landing pages and so on) and testing and measuring different tactics such as time of day for ads to appear etc.

PPC is simple in principle but increasingly complex in practice. There are qualifications now for Google Adwords practitioners so unless the agency handling your account has accredited people, start asking some serious questions.