Help Your Customers Find You in Cyberspace

5. No-brainer Gifts

By offering pages of gift ideas, you’re not only providing a useful tool for shoppers, but great search engine fodder, as well. An enormous number of people search for phases that include “gifts” or “gift ideas.” Optimize your gift ideas pages and place them as high up in your site hierarchy as possible — ideally one click away from the homepage, to maximize the flow of PageRank to these pages.

Gift certificates are a godsend for the procrastinating, last-minute shopper. And it completely takes the guesswork out of choosing the right gift. So make your gift certificates prominent on your site, and cross-sell them like crazy.

6. Feature Your Freebies

Shoppers love free stuff. If you offer free giftwrap or free shipping, feature that prominently on your homepage and in your search listings, either in the title or the snippet.

In Google, you have more control over the title portion of your search listing than the snippet. So consider putting a free offer right in your title tag. Although you should try to keep the title tag to fewer than a dozen words, don’t dilute the keyword focus too much. Make sure your most important keywords are leading in the title tag.

Your search listing in Google or MSN Search may be based on your Open Directory listing rather than the title of your homepage and meta description or sampling of copy from your homepage. If that’s the case, there’s a meta tag — the meta noodp tag — that allows you to opt out of having your Open Directory listing used in the search listing. This is useful if your Open Directory listing doesn’t have a good call to action and doesn’t cater to holiday shoppers.

7. Make Google Ads Stand Out

If you offer Google Checkout as a payment option on your site, Google will display a small green shopping cart graphic adjacent to your Google AdWords ads. The graphic helps draw the searcher’s attention to your ad over those ads without the graphic. This may give you a little boost in your clickthroughs.