Help Your Customers Find You in Cyberspace

9 ways to get your site search-ready for the holidays.

The clock is ticking. Holiday shopping season is just around the corner. More customers will turn to your Web site than ever before. That means it’s time to tune it up for maximum search engine visibility. Here are nine traffic-building tips that’ll make your site sing “Happy Holidays” long after the season is done.

1. Link Building

Links are the currency of search engines. Improving the quantity and quality of your inbound links will pay dividends. Add a handful of links from high-PageRank, relevant sites and you’ll see an impact within weeks. (PageRank is Google’s importance scores, on a logarithmic scale of 0 to 10.) A single link from a PageRank 8 homepage has even significantly boosted rankings within days. Just don’t garner too many links at once, or you may set off red flags at Yahoo! and Google.

You probably won’t get sites to link to you just out of the goodness of their hearts or because you have a cool Web site. So if you have an online advertising budget, consider spending some of it on sponsoring organizations that’ll recognize your generosity by linking to you.

Also, look at existing partners that link to you from high-PageRank pages, and see if you can persuade them to improve the link text they use. If you sell toys and their link text is “click here,” perhaps they’d be willing to revise it to “ABC Co. Toy Store” (substituting ABC Co. with your company name).

2. Blog

If you have a blog and don’t post to it daily, the holiday season is a great time to start. Try posting multiple times per day. Posting frequency has a positive effect on traffic and readership. Even if you can’t blog every day throughout the year, do it during the holidays.