As the 1st of December is finally here, and the Christmas spirit is spreading around the Creare SEO department in the form of Bing Crosby and gold tinsel, it’s certainly time to think about Christmas SEO strategies… for 2012 that is. If your Christmas strategy for 2011 isn’t well under way by now then I’m afraid you’ve missed the boat. Or maybe you’ve recently launched your e-commerce site and you’re only just starting to create your overall SEO strategy. Christmas next year might seem like a long way off, but follow my tips and you’ll save yourself a lot of hassle when the time comes next year.

Choosing keywords – grab the data while you can!

This is one of the main inspirations for this post, since Google stopped reporting keywords in Analytics for signed-in users, there have been various posts reporting that the update has affected 9% – 23% of visits. Without that percentage of data, you might find it more difficult to track exactly which keywords are driving you sales this winter. Plus if Google have their way, this percentage will only increase as more and more people sign into the various Google products. So ensure you have Google Analytics installed on your website and grab all the data you can get this year, it’s more valuable than you think.

As for new e-commerce sites, you might not even gain organic traffic from your top Christmas keywords this year, so the easiest way to discover which keywords have higher levels of traffic and whether they’re likely to convert , is to do pay-per-click advertising. Gaining traffic almost instantly through PPC campaigns will not only allow you to see which keywords have the most potential, but should also generate you some sales. Set yourself a PPC budget and treat it as research which could save you money in the long term – there’s a lot to be said for choosing the right keywords at the start of an SEO campaign and sticking with them. You don’t want to spend months building up your rankings to discover that those keywords have a lower conversion rate than alternatives would.

Landing pages – test now, reap the rewards later

A key ingredient in gaining organic rankings is content, and that content sits on the landing pages that you want to rank, the pages you will then be driving traffic to. So not only do you want to ensure you have original, relevant content for SEO, you also want to make sure your landing pages will convert that organic traffic into sales. Monitor and evaluate the combined conversion rates of your landing pages and the keywords they’re optimised for. Christmas is a good time to do this as more people are shopping online and you should get more figures to improve the statistical relevance of your findings. If any of your top landing pages have a lower conversion rate than your site’s average – spend the next 11 months improving these so you can increase your return during the festive season in 2012.

Link building – find the festive freshness

Carry out competitor research this year – monitor which sites are ranking for the keywords you think you’re likely to target next year and see what links they have using the those terms as anchor text. With Google’s recent algorithm update placing importance on freshness, perform some searches this month with your target and related keywords – you might just find some news sites that you can approach to gain some coverage and traffic this year, all whilst starting to create seasonal links to help your rankings for Christmas next year.

Let us know your thoughts – do you have any seasonal research tips? Do you too get driven crazy by the sound of Wizzard’s one hit wonder?

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
- Albert Einstein

Here at Creare we do our very best to perpetually reevaluate our processes, techniques and SEO skills. This is because if we didn’t, we’d become set in our ways; only using the resources and techniques that we prefer and which come naturally to us.

If you’ve been working in the SEO industry for more than a few weeks, you might fancy yourself as something of an expert. In this field, we have to learn quickly because if we fail to do so then we can easily get left behind. However, even a world-renowned God of SEO, if such a being were to exist, would have to reassess his or her skills periodically; otherwise, bad habits can creep in.

The latest Creare training refresher took place late last week and concentrated on the subject of link building. For your edification (or amusement, as the case may be!) please find the main points, as I interpret them, summarised here. And remember, a rolling stone gathers no moss.

1. Directory Links

It’s worth revisiting and reevaluating this old SEO favourite quite regularly. While it’s still not widely disputed that SEO friendly directories are pointless, there’s always a chance that future Google led updates could relegate the authority and usefulness of these resources.

I think there’s a large discrepancy between the best directories which have a definite SEO value (such as DMOZ) and the poorer sites, which almost certainly have no benefit to a campaign (easy now, I won’t name names!) This means that it’s vital you approach each directory on a case by case basis. A good tip is to spend some time creating a database of previously reviewed directories – this way you don’t have to analyse each and every one when link building.

2. Blog Commenting

I think this form of link building is probably the most underused of those in this list. Commenting is simply where you visit a blog relevant to your industry, read the content thereupon and make a comment, including of course a link to your site in the appropriate field. It’s surprisingly time consuming, so if you’re opting for this method then be sure to set aside enough of your day.

Make sure the site’s updated regularly too. Overall, blog commenting is useful, but probably only as an auxiliary element of your campaign.

3. Article Links

This most ancient and venerable of link building techniques is second only to directory submissions in terms of age. It’s still around for one reason – it works. Google and the other major search engines love to see regularly updated, high quality content; it’s cat nip for spiders. That’s why article links remain so useful. In my experience, a link embedded in high quality content will always be viewed more favourable by Google, when compared to a standalone link bereft of context.

Things to consider: domain authority, categories, duplicate content.

You should also be aware of content farms, which may or may not be helpful for SEO purposes. Hint: they’re not.

4. Internal Linking

This may seem like the odd one out in the list, but it actually deserves to be here. Good internal linking does many things, but the main point here is that it helps the search engines navigate through and around your site, so that all of the delicious, keyword topped content can be consumed. Some of your strongest links may also be from internal pages, as those pages linked from the homepage will be awarded a higher pagerank than those more deeply buried in your site.

Of course, avoid linking every page from the homepage, but select a few of your most important pages and link these naturally from your homepage. This will in turn help those pages build more authority, which will help them to rank better in the search.

5. [Insert Technique Here]

As I am in fact a genius (!), I have plenty more techniques to discuss, but I’d like to hear some of your suggestions instead. Comment below with anything you think could bolster an SEO campaign, I’d love to hear from you.
With Einstein’s words in mind, please remember that this is only a very basic list of SEO link building options. SEO experts could, and have, lavished rivers of digital ink discussing the worthiness of each of this list, but here at Creare we base our assertions on the results that we achieve in our campaigns.

How generating great content can transform your SEO, improving your internet marketing and increasing your brand visibility to help you sell more stuff!

One of the things that really affect your SEO is the content on your website. It needs to be informative, useful and regularly updated to achieve the most SEO benefit.

So, you may be sat there thinking ‘but I don’t have time to create new content for my website everyday!’ and very true, you probably don’t. So, where does this magic content come from? Well, here’s the genius part. You have several options, a decent SEO Company (like Creare) will regularly create articles written on your behalf to update your site with. At Creare we’re quite strict about the article titles and content: it must reflect the keywords our customers pay for. The content has to reflect our customers’ businesses and we always create links going back to the relevant pages within the site we are optimising. So, that’s one option, but I did mention there were several options available to you, so here’s the rest…

Get your employees to write blog posts on a regular basis. This is what we do here at Creare, I’m writing this post because it’s an integral part of my job. It has a use in that I have to write about something that regular readers will find interesting and informative, as well as being beneficial for our own SEO efforts.

By getting your employees involved, you not only increase your content with information that is useful to your customers, but empower your employees as well. OK, a lot of them may not feel confident with their writing skills, but the more you do something, the better you get at it! Another thing to consider is that you probably don’t know how much your employees know about what it is you do, you will probably find yourself pleasantly surprised at their knowledge.

By spreading the workload, you will find it all gets done, by professional people who will start to feel real pride in their achievements. Don’t forget to distribute your articles and blog posts through Social Media Networks for an even bigger boost to your efforts.

Even if you do employ an SEO Company like Creare who regularly write articles on your behalf, you should still consider getting your employees involved. It’s such a beneficial exercise – you’d be crazy no to do it!

We have written about the benefits of quality over quantity links ad nauseom over here at Creare, but I do still think it is a subject worthy of discussion.

As Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Strategist at Google says in his recent blog post: Quality links to your site, published on Monday – a quality link is always going to be worth much more than a hundred ‘spammy’ links. So, how does a person determine which links are ‘quality’ and which are not?

Well, I think a lot of this comes down to experience, when I first started dabbling in SEO a few years ago, (and, my, the discipline has changed since then!) I know I fell into some pretty easy traps and pitfalls when it came to link building. One thing that I do know about link building is that it isn’t easy. Whichever way you come to look at it, ‘easy’ is not a word I would use to describe it, not that it’s technically very difficult, of course, just that it’s time consuming and requires patience, dedication, and to some extent a certain amount of luck.

So, what pitfalls and traps could a green SEO newbie easily find themselves slipping down?

Lets start with Rubbish Directories – when I started my first SEO Campaign (many moons ago now) I seem to remember spending hours (literally hours) submitting my site to a gazillion directories. Some were ok, and I would even go so far as to say I would use them again today, some, however were absolutely diabolical.

What do you look for in a good directory then? I hear you ask – and because I am feeling generous I’ll let you in to a few little secrets I’ve picked up the hard way…

1. Is the directory relevant? At the very least it should have a relevant category
2. Does the directory provide SEO friendly links (by this I mean, make sure the links aren’t PHP forwarders or other such uselessness)
3. Is the directory active?
4. Look at the page you want to link from, does it have a lot of other links? – The fewer the links the better
5. What is the PageRank of the directory?
6. Are the Links Follow or Nofollow (not that Nofollow links should always be discounted, just if the site asks for an administration fee then bear this in mind)

This seems a good place to add in a comment on Kaspar Szymanski’s blog that caught my eye:

Zack Pike said…
Kaspar – Very relevant artice. I lead the SEO strategy for a Fortune 200 company and I get cold calls on quick turn linkbuilding all of the time, it gets especially frustrating when someone above my pay level catches wind of “linkbuilding” and how this “great” new strategy can get you to the top of Google. It takes a lot of time educating my internal stakeholders that the key to generating quality links, that are going to have any effect, is great content and interaction with our consumers and KOLs online. I’m glad you wrote this post so I can reference it in my presentations… Straight from the source. Thanks!

Kaspar Szymanski goes on to say in  his blog post that your site’s content is extremely important to gain quality backlinks through natural processes. Well, I tend to agree with him, and this is why I say that link building isn’t easy.

To continually come up with unique and interesting content for your site is an ongoing and arduous task. It’s important to weigh up the value a page one listing will have over the time you spend on this task. If you know that the time spent on such things is worthwhile then invest your efforts there.  If it’s not going to make commercial sense then look to other online marketing activities such as email marketing or PPC Advertising and invest your time and money there instead. But, this isn’t the place for such discussions, we’re and SEO blog, and SEO is what we’re all about, so… If you have decided that it’s worth your while developing you content, then look outside the box. There are many forms of content besides plain old text, though text is still extremely important (and will remain so for as long as Google uses text as fodder).

Think about including a web video  to your pages. This will add value to you users, can increase the time spent onsite (I think this is a Ranking Factor), and generally gets you noticed. If you employ Video Optimisation techniques then your videos will even start to appear in the SERPs and it doesn’t take a genius to work out that videos are much more likely to get clicked than text. You’ll also find that your videos will get distributed and linked to by others within your community.

I would say, if it’s lasting effect you are after then humour will have it’s down side – the benefits are often short-lived. You will get a spike in traffic, but it will always remain just this – a spike. For lasting effects add something your users will want to return to regularly and will find useful in the future.

Kaspar also talks about Social Media. I have to confess, this is an area that I feel a little out of my depth in, however, with a strategy behind it I think it can be very powerful. It’s just about leveraging what you want from it (like pretty much everything else in life, eh?). His tip of making sure you provide a link to Twitter or Facebook is a great and simple one to implement. It’s just about making it easy for non-techy folk to share online content.

Finally – Look at your competitors – where have they got links from? Could you get links from similar industries? If it works for them, it could well work for you too. Don’t copy, obviously, but use your competitors for ideas. You never know where it may lead.