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.

Can he be serious?

Apparently it’s all about IT. The same goes for SEO. If only.

I don’t normally comment on competitors but this one’s a Gloucestershire web designer and I met the owner last week. Nice chap who seemed to know what he was talking about.

Let’s deal with the creative question first. If there’s no creativity invested in your website design and writing, what do you get? A website that functions perfectly and engages nobody. Creativity is the essence of memorable communication. “Apologies for the long letter but I didn’t have time to write a short one”- Winston Churchill. Pithy, witty and true - that’s creative communication.

“Search engine optimisation  is an IT task”. Ok, SEO involves technical tasks, er, lots of them - site structure (that’s partly about usability but let’s not be picky), internal linking, site maps and more. But none of these tasks is worth doing if the keywords are wrong, if the content is rubbish, if the tags are badly written, if nobody wants to link to your rubbish content, if your content doesn’t engage and if you don’t think creatively about how to get those precious inbound links. In other words, the technical tasks are essential but they’re subordinate to the thinking and creativity that you need to make them worth doing.

I’ll get back in my cage now.