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Optimizing for Christmas Sales

Driving traffic your way during the holiday season by Alan Webb

Nov 07, 2003

Christmas is only around the corner, and next month the Christmas season's increase in traffic, for e-commerce sites especially, will start. Therefore, now is the time to get your website ready for all the Christmas present searchers. This article gives you a few ideas about what you should be doing NOW in order to maximise traffic from search engines over the festive season.

There are many things you really should be taking care of NOW (early November) with regards to increasing your websites visibility over the festive season. Below are a few online marketing ideas, and a 10-point checklist of things you might want to check over.

It is at this time that marketing managers should be thinking of special offers for the festive period. It can be anything such as "two for the price of one," or a limited time discount, or special Christmas only product/item, or even some kind of Christmas competition. Whatever you decide to do, it gives you a fantastic opportunity to create new pages for your website. This of course enables you to optimize those new special offer pages for search terms your existing pages may not cover. The more "special offer" pages you can add, the better. In my experience, most webmasters add Christmas offer content to existing pages, a paragraph or two about their special Christmas offer just at the time the offer starts. This is a big mistake.

Uploading Christmas offer pages well over a month before the season causes a little bit of a dilemma in that the offer may well not have started yet. What you need to do is get the pages up now. However, if the offer doesn't start until December, simply add something like "Our forthcoming Christmas offer starting on…" or simply "Special Christmas offer starts soon" or such. It is however imperative you get the pages up now, or else the search engine spiders are not going to index your new content and rank it in time to be found during the Christmas online shopping period.

Use these new pages to add secondary keywords to your website. For example, if you sell DVDs online, and have optimized your existing pages for "DVDs online," "DVD online shop" and "DVD films," you might want to make sure your new pages include some other search terms such as "new DVD releases," "DVD Movies," "Discount DVDs," etc. From a search engine optimization perspective, the period before Christmas gives you a golden opportunity to be found on search terms you didn't previously have. In short, develop Christmas offer pages optimized for terms you are not currently found on that are of course relevant to your site.

Creating new web pages for new keywords should not be just limited to Christmas, but for whenever you have a special offer for one or more products/services.

The above covers the creation of Christmas special offer pages, but as you have your HTML editor now open, take the time to check that your existing pages are also up to scratch as far as search engine optimization is concerned. Below is a 10-point Christmas SEO checklist:

  1. Is your product name and related main search terms in the title tag, e.g. <title>Keyword rich title</title>
  2. Do you have your main search terms in the visible text at least three times.
  3. Are you linking from your other internal pages to your product pages with keyword rich link text e.g. <a href="http://www.yourdomain/product-page.htm">Product or Keyword</a>
  4. Are you using the Alt attribute on images to add your main search terms.
  5. Have you recently tried to gain links from other websites. If not, do so now.
  6. Can you exchange existing graphic text(image) for normal text anywhere on your pages.
  7. Can you add text to those pages that currently have very little content.
  8. Have you made sure you have different meta descriptions for EVERY page.
  9. Do you have a site map to assist search engine spiders in finding your pages.
  10. Have you checked that those linking to you, are doing so with the optimum link text (anchor text).

There is no better time than now to get the HTML editor out than now. Tweaking your site for the Christmas search traffic can increase your online revenue more than you might imagine.

If you would like to know more about search engine optimization, check out my 15 page tutorial on the subject here.

I hope this article has at least given you some food for thought. Too often Christmas creeps up on you and often it's too late for webmasters to make the most out of the increase in searchers looking to buy something. Don't let it happen to you this year!

About the Author:


Alan Webb is CEO of ABAKUS Internet Marketing and is respected as one of the most knowledgable professionals in the field of search engine marketing. Alan moderates on several leading search engine marketing forums such as seochat.com and searchguild.com. Alan has had many articles published in major German and English language on/offline Internet and IT publications, including Darwinmag.com, Computerweekly.com, Computerworld.com, The Philadelphia Enquirer newspaper, Tomorrow magazine (German) and other major publications.

Although ABAKUS Internet Marketing only formed last year, previously Alan had been optimizing websites for over 3 years as an online marketing manager for a major German communications company. The ABAKUS Internet Marketing website is now already Germany's leading search engine marketing resource (Alexa ranking under 3,500) and has only within the past couple of months been translated into English. With a 15-page search engine optimization tutorial, SEO quiz (fun, but not easy), SEO blog , forum and consolidated SEO online tools page, the english language pages are quickly becoming as popular as the German.

Alan was born in Portsmouth, England, is bi-lingual (german/english) and currently lives and works in Hanover, Germany with his wife Ulrike and daughter Alison.