Last Chance For Christmas Rankings
by Andy Beal


At the time of writing this article, Christmas is just eight 
weeks away. Many stores have their Christmas displays in place, 
television advertisements are already featuring festive themes 
and the shopping malls are busily hiring Santa in preparation 
for the busiest time of the year. Yet despite all the efforts 
of traditional "brick and mortar" retailers to boost Christmas 
sales, a recent Reuters report predicted that online sales will 
grow by 35% year-on-year to $16.8 billion in the fourth quarter 
and that retail website sales will kick into gear by December 2nd.

That leaves just five weeks to ensure that your website shares 
in a piece of that $16.8 billion in online sales. If your 
company hasn't already made plans to make the most of this 
years predicted, recording breaking Internet growth, then it 
may be too late. Most of your competitors have already 
implemented some kind of search engine strategy and are one 
step ahead. So what can you do?

Too late for Christmas?

From now until the week before Christmas, you will no doubt 
see many articles with last minute suggestions for increasing 
search engine traffic. However, in order to achieve top search 
engine placement for the Christmas season, you really should 
have started your campaign many weeks ago. Anything that you 
attempt now must be implemented with pin-point accuracy and 
lightning speed if you are to beat the sound of sleigh bells 
and enjoy increased Christmas sales. For those of you up to the 
challenge, I have compiled a check-list of things you can do to 
help increase your website traffic.


1. Are You Using Paid Inclusions? 

The typical search engine can take up to six weeks to spider a 
website and then display it in a fresh index. With this in mind, 
make sure any new pages you create or optimize are submitted to 
the main paid inclusion services. Paid inclusion allows you to 
buy your way into a search engine and subsequently see your 
website indexed at a much faster rate, typically within 2-7 days. 
While this does not offer any promises of better search engine 
rankings or more traffic, it does allow you to ensure that all 
of those Christmas specials you're running are picked up by the 
search engines now and not sometime in January.

Paid inclusion is rapidly becoming a popular service with many 
search engines. It allows a website owner to obtain faster 
indexing, while providing a new revenue stream for the search 
engines themselves. While there are many options, the main paid 
inclusion services to consider are:

Positiontech (http://www.positiontech.com/)- one of the first, 
and best, paid inclusion services. Their service allows you to 
add your most important pages to both Inktomi and AlltheWeb/Lycos 
partners.

InfoSpider (https://www.infospider.com/av/app/signup)- they 
have the monopoly on AltaVista's paid inclusion program. While 
AltaVista is struggling to return to it's glory days as one of 
the best search engines, it is still worth paying the fee to 
have your most important pages included for Christmas.

Ineedhits (http://ask.ineedhits.com/)- the first company to 
partner up with Ask Jeeves. Their paid inclusion service is 
quick and affordable. Within a week, you should see your 
pages on Ask.com and Teoma.com.
 
2. Have You Updated Your Content?

I'm sure you have all read that websites that update regularly 
are likely to attract search engine spiders on a more frequent 
basis. If your website content has remained the same since Santa 
last climbed down the chimney, it's time for a change. Update 
your site to ensure that your most popular or best-priced products 
are easy to find from the index page. Add all of your "Christmas 
specials" and new products. If you have time, go one step further 
and create new pages that target the items or services that give 
your company the best profit margins. Two or three highly targeted 
pages should be on every website owners Christmas list!

3. Custom "404-error" Page.

Check with your website host or Webmaster and make sure you have 
implemented a custom 404 error page. If you're going to add new 
products and pages for Christmas, you'll increase the chances of 
a visitor stumbling on a page that no longer exists or has been 
moved. Customized 404 pages are always a good idea, but at this 
time of the year you can use them to show your Christmas specials.
In addition, you can add links to other important pages on your 
website so that both Christmas shoppers and search engine spiders 
can navigate their way through the rest of your content.

4. Meta tags - Yes You Should Update Them!

While many SEOs believe that Meta tags have lost their value 
over the years, I believe they can still offer some benefit if 
you are looking for last minute Christmas traffic. I know, I 
know; you've read many articles that insist that Meta tags are 
just not worth bothering with anymore, but let me ask you a 
simple question. How long does it take to change the Meta tags 
on a page? Weeks? Days? Hours? No, of course not, in just a few 
minutes you can change the Meta tags on a page to be more 
targeted and efficient. Compared to building links or changing 
the content on a page, changing your Meta tags is a piece of 
(Christmas) cake. And when I say Meta tags, I don't just mean 
the "keywords" tag. Meta tags include the "Title" and 
"Description" tags as well. Forget using dozens of keywords 
in your Meta tags and be more selective. Focus on the most 
important keywords for that page. Remember, less is more.

No Time To Waste.

That should keep you busy. By no means is it an exhaustive list 
of changes you should make to increase search engine rankings 
and traffic for Christmas, but it is certainly enough to keep 
you busy over the next few weeks. And remember, nearly every 
single website can benefit from the increased traffic this time 
of the year. While Christmas has obvious benefits for retail 
websites, most other industries see increased website traffic 
during the fourth quarter. If you have already implemented an 
SEO campaign this year, the above fine-tuning should ensure that 
you have a very merry Christmas.

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Andy Beal is Vice President of Marketing for KeywordRanking.com, 
specialists in search engine marketing. Respected as a source of 
search engine optimization advice, Andy has had articles 
published around the world. KeywordRanking.com has grown to 
become one of the larger and more successful search engine 
marketing companies. They were one of the first companies to 
offer guaranteed levels of success using spam-free methods.
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