It May Be Summer, But Itll Be Christmas Before You Know It

Theres a strange inversion in the seasons that cant be attributed to global warming. Christmas is when all the holiday advertising starts, and any time now well be seeing Christmas presents appearing in the shops. Which means that savvy Internet marketers are spending the summer getting their sites ready for Christmas.

The wisdom of this is obvious for retail sites, after all its the busiest time of the year. But what about business-to-business? As retail prepares for an income boost, B2B gets ready for an inevitable slump.

The Internet doesnt close for Christmas, so its worth considering what can be done on-line, either to maximise the seasonal peak or ride out the festive trough. Nows a very good time to overhaul the Website to make sure it does the best job possible over those crucial months.

Your position in the search engines springs to mind as an obvious issue here. Anything you do is unlikely to make an overnight improvement in your listings; building your ranking is a slow process that typically takes months. Which is why you need to be thinking about this right now. To achieve the best results possible you need to put a tick in all the important boxes; miss out an element and youre groping in the dark.

But lets be clear: you need to get started straight away. If Christmas is your main selling period  or if its when your cash-flow takes a dive - then you need to be climbing the rankings in the next two months to be in position to build your business. So start your search engine optimisation now.

The Peril of Duplicate Content

Perversely, your best efforts to improve your listings could be to no avail because Google isnt even looking at your site. This isnt to do with submitting to the search engines, its a quirk of Googles algorithm that can leave people baffled why their site isnt being found.

If Google finds two sites with near-identical content, then its likely to ignore one of them as a copy. It may even ignore both. Its worth copying a string of unique text from your Website and pasting it into Google. This could reveal an unauthorised copy somewhere thats not only infringing your copyright, it could be damaging your search engine ranking!

But its possible for your own site to appear to Google as a duplicate of itself. This phenomenon, known as a canonical domain, occurs when typing the domain with or without www at the start points directly to the same location. Google sees the two addresses as discrete but identical Websites. Its quite easy to correct this problem by creating a permanent redirect from one version of the domain to the other.

Keyword Clean-up

Think about how you use search. Most people now have wised-up to the fact that the best results come back if they search for a short phrase, or even a fairly detailed description of what theyre looking for. Yet those same people try to grab search engine real estate with single keywords, putting themselves hopelessly into competition with millions of other sites  many of which arent even their competitors.

So take the time to put some real thought into the phrases that appear on your site. Dont try to make a single page into a candidate for half a dozen phrase; the key to having Google understand what your pages are about is to specialise.

Build Links Slowly

Its fairly widely known that Google bases much of its judgement of a sites authority on the number, type and quality of links pointing to it. As a result, many companies have opted for the route of acquiring vast numbers of incoming links. And a few of them have paid the price of trying to fool the search engines.

In recent months weve seen a number of major on-line organisations  including two front-line insurance companies  blacklisted by Google. In their battle for position for high competition terms like "car insurance" theyd been a little too overt in acquiring links.

This highlights an axiom for anyone who wants to build long-lasting rankings in Google: Give the search engines what they really want.

Google isnt operated by idiots. They know exactly what tricks site operators pull to try to fool their algorithms, and theyre getting better every day at spotting the perpetrators. A link to your site should be granted because the linking Website operator believes you have something of interest to its visitors, not because you paid someone $20 for a listing.

So dont launch into a programme to build a thousand new links a month. Think about creating news stories that could be syndicated, look for related sites that carry material thats relevant to your area. Link-building is still an important element of search engine ranking development, but quality is now far outranking quantity.

Examine The Statistics

Finally, take a long, hard look at exactly what your visitors are doing. If you dont have a statistics package on your site, get one. Google Analytics is free and does a fine job. And if you do have stats available  use them! Dont hide behind "Ive had a look, but I didnt really understand them". Spend half an hour or so and youll soon start to get what theyre telling you. And when you do get it, make changes. Tweak your site until every visitor is giving you maximum value.

If you start all this now, while the suns still shining (UK readers can ignore that last phrase), youll be in better shape this Christmas than you were last year.

...and may we be the first to say it: Merry Christmas.

XSEOs MD, Matt Paines, has been involved in the internet since 1995 and has been actively involved in search engine optimisation (SEO) since 1997. He was the only UK SEO invited to participate in the Microsoft Search Engine Champs project, which was first run in 2004. Matt speaks at various local and national seminars on the subject of internet marketing. He also provides services and research an an expert witness in Internet Marketing and Copyright related legal cases