7 Hot SEO Tips For The Holiday Season

For you to be leveraging Google for free holiday season search traffic, you probably should have already started your SEO campaign. But if you haven’t, don’t despair –Here are 7 hot tips to help you get your Google ranking strategy on track quickly.

1. Product Page Content and Titles: If your website isn’t new, your product pages probably have some SEO value already. So it’s a great time to leverage the SEO strength you have. Ensure all your product page optimization (titles, tags, keyword density etc) is up to scratch.

2. Create New Holiday Focused Product Content: The holiday period increases the search volume of seasonal keywords such as “gifts”, “deals”, “presents”, “best buys” etc.

There are often advantages to creating new pages or content on your site with a focus on these keywords. You can do this by creating new holiday specific pages (e.g. Christmas specials page) with optimized URLs, titles and page content, or even my posting new content on your site’s blog – again optimized accordingly.

3. Holiday Season Product Media: Optimization of product media such as images and video can be a quick way to gain fast SEO results as it’s often under optimized by competitors. When people are looking for products; images and videos can be an important part of their buying decision, so make sure all your media has keyword rich file names and media tags (e.g. alt tags).

4. Internal Linking Strategy: If you have pages on your website that contain your strongest selling holiday season products – it’s important to use internal linking to help bolster these pages. Where possible link to these pages from your other high ranking pages to give them a PR boost.

5. Link Maintenance: While building up valuable links can take time to produce ranking improvements, it’s important to ensure the links you already have pointing to your website are in good working order. Things to consider include:

1. Fix broken links
2. Ensure link text is optimized for the product related keywords
3. Ensure links are point to the right pages

6. Content Marketing: When you’re looking for fast organic results, sometimes its better to leverage the existing ranking strength of other sites.

Content syndication sites are great for this such as article and press release sites. Create some keyword rich product related content and post it on these with links back to your site and products.

7. Google Place Local Listing Optimization: If you have a bricks and mortar business, there are huge holiday season SEO opportunities in your Google Places (aka Google Local) listings.

Now is the time to ensure your listing has a good list of the products you offer, any deals or discounts available and other important buying information.

Time is of the essence when it comes to these strategies. The quicker you get started, the more likely they will generate results for you leading up to the holiday sales rush.

If you have any other handy SEO tips that product quick results for the holiday season, share them with your fellow readers below.

Source: ineedhits.com

Google Launches URL Shortener with SEO Impact

Google’s new URL shortening service, Goo.gl has just been launched to the public. Goo.gl comes with its own site (http://goo.gl) and some cool analytics.

http://goo.gl/1MC9 - They are especially helpful in applications that have character restrictions, like Twitter and its 140 character limit.

goo.gl has been incorporated into many Google products including News, Blogger, Maps, Picasa Web Albums, and Moderator. However, Google claims not to have overloaded it with too many features as they want goo.gl to be the most stable, most secure, and fastest URL shortener available on the web.

Google explains more on its Social Web Blog:

There are many shorteners out there with great features, so some people may wonder whether the world really needs yet another. As we said late last year, we built goo.gl with a focus on quality.

Google claims there are three aspects that make goo.gl a stand out from other URL shorteners:

• Stability: goo.gl promises nearly 100% uptime making it a stable and robust product.
• Security: goo.gl features automatic spam detection and protects against malware & phishing based on the same type of filtering technology use in Gmail.
• Speed: has doubled in just over nine month since its first launch.

Google’s URL shortener could have an impact on your SEO and even the Google algorithm. From a link building perspective the act of merely sharing a link on social networks and the resulting click-through could carry benefits for the downstream website.

IF popular goo.gl could find itself a spot in the Google ranking algorithm and becomes a prime factor in real-time and regular search (although an ambitious thoughts for now).

What is most interesting is the demographic mining that shortening a URL with goo.gl will produce. While users are shortening a URL, Google will be tracking information from their Google account. Essentially, the URL shortener will be a “vote” (or Like) that’s passed along with some valuable demographic information when Google users are signed in.

Source: ineedhits.com