It may seem like the holiday shopping season is too far off, but the beginning of September is the perfect time to create and test you SEO and PPC strategies for the months ahead. In the online world, quite a few people start buying gifts in advance. If your site is positioned for Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa shoppers before these seasons arrive, you can pick up a nice chunk of business from these early birds. Better yet, you will have a head start over some of the larger online retailers who tend to launch website specials in big blocks or wait for the “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” times to ramp up their spending.

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Here are a couple of things you can do today to get ready for the holiday season:

• Update Your Pricing. If your prices are significantly higher than other stores, then there may be an even bigger gap when specials come out. Conversely, you may be leaving cash on the table if your prices are super-low.
• Test Your Shopping Cart. Make a few test transactions, or actually buy a small item on your own credit card, and see if there are any issues that might prevent a shopper with marginal online skills from making a purchase. Carts that appeal to basic internet skill levels can make more sales and gain more loyalty.
• Consider shipping cut-off dates. Many people who run drop-ship ecommerce sites can have a high return rate if they don’t announce the last possible day some items can be shipped, and if it is possible to ship next-day, there is a sweet spot of last-minute shoppers who can enhance the profit margin in the last few days before Christmas.
• Send Coupon Codes to Past Customers. Whether you use email or post cards to send out collateral material, the cost of an online discount code is still usually less than the cost of pay-per-click advertising to new customers. The conversion rate is generally higher for these customers as well.
• Train Your Staff. In many ecommerce companies, everyone becomes a customer service agent during peak buying times. Training your staff in advance, and soliciting feedback from experienced employees, can smooth out some of the inevitable bumps in the road that come during peak performance dates.
• Prepare For Information Technology Issues. Do you outsource your IT, or pay a local agency to do it? Chances are, your professionals will be working on quite a few critical issues for big clients at this time. Companies with big IT staffs often implement a code freeze on sites just to make sure new bugs aren’t introduced that may take negatively affect the online store. Therefore, the best time to address any website functionality issues is today, before your programmers become distracted.

Holiday shoppers can be the difference between a year’s profit and loss for many online sellers as well as their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Whether economic times are good or bad, there is still more shopping in this time period, and it pays to be prepared for all the things that can happen. There are always a few surprises with vendors, shippers, the weather, and other events, but they seem to become more concentrated during the hectic holiday season. By minimizing issues with your website and your ability to get orders out the door, your level of anxiety and exhaustion can be significantly reduced.

Sometimes you only care about getting search engine traffic. For example, you may want to generate leads and then sell those leads to other sources. Or, you might have a shopping cart that resides on one main site, but you can send traffic to it from a series of “feeder” sites. If this is the case, and you don’t have any concerns related to branding, then using a .net or .org domain extension can be a profitable way to get search engine traffic.

Why does this work? The main reason is that Bing and Google have a soft spot for exact match domain names. This behavior is known is some circles as “navigational search” and it implies that search engines know people are looking for specific sites (like a brand name) so they show results that contain matches on the search query. In many cases you can rank for long-tail terms just by having a little content on a site with an exact match domain name, and if the clicks you get are good converters, then the site can justify its own existence in a short amount of time. You can even occasionally get results with a .info domain name on a good website, but exotic domain extensions don’t appear to get the same consideration.

Obviously, a better website gets better results, but the appeal of exact match domains is that you can often snap up .net and .org domain names for the cost of registration, though some are listed as premium domain names by speculators. As an added tip, you can generally bargain down the price of a premium domain name since speculators may be carrying a large inventory. If you doubt the power of .net and .org domains, then you should consider the brisk sales in the domain name aftermarket for names that match some of the higher-end words and phrases in all fields of online commerce.

The pros and cons of .net and .org domain names should always be addressed in the context of the site’s goals. For one thing, buying names along this line usually indicates that you aren’t concerned about branding and name recognition as much as you care about traffic. A company interested in a brand should secure the .com version of the domain name whenever possible, because people will often just type in the brand name into the browser bar followed by “.com.” Developing a well optimized site on these domains is usually cheaper for the exact match phrase, but will be just as much of a challenge for terms not related to the site name. From a link building standpoint, you can get a better lift even when people just link to your domain name. Observations in the field usually show that .org domains seem to have an SEO edge over ones ending in .net, but not enough to be a roadblock if the .net domain name is the only one available.

As an added bonus, .net and .org sites also become more sellable when they start to crack the top 10. This is especially true in lead generation and affiliate fields where people may be prevented from buying PPC ads either due to keyword content, affiliate status, or previous behavior.  While domain flipping is an art and science in itself, it usually works better when there is an actual website involved, and a domain becomes more attractive when there is a site with a current search engine listing. Many companies will periodically buy ranking websites and then refurbish them with the knowledge that particular keyword combinations have enough volume and conversion to be profitable. Choosing the right domain extensions can put you onto the same playing field as companies that spend thousands of dollars per day on paid clicks, and get you some very attractive results.

You don’t need a website to practice SEO. Depending on what your goals are, you can present yourself and your business to interested parties by using SEO principles and understanding a few things about how search engines work. In fact, there are several places you can get noticed for little or no money, and by using some simple optimization techniques you can piggyback off the trust of someone else’s site to achieve your objectives.

The main thing to remember about search is that it is all about matching up content with things that people actually type into search engines and other search tools. In many cases, those tools are not on the engines themselves but built in to sites that are dedicated to a single topic. Considering that many search tools are powered by Google or follow the same general rules, you can make your content stand out. First, you want to use a keyword tool to find out what the popular search terms are, and secondarily you want to blend some of the most popular terms into your content.

Here are a couple of different examples of how to SEO different online resources: 

• Are you looking for a job, or wanting to move up? If the latest news stories are a guide, then 20% of the employable workforce is right there with you. This can be discouraging for the average job seeker, but you can use SEO and existing websites like Careerbulilder and Jobing.com to your advantage. When you put your resume on a job site, be sure to reword it with some of the most popular search phrases (but not too many) in a way that looks natural. For example, if you want a job in writing, you may note that “technical writer” gets almost 3 times the search volume as “copy editor” but if you’re looking for either opening, you can craft a line such as “I quickly moved from a position as a technical writer to a copy editor thanks to my detail-oriented approach.” Whether you are posting a resume on a job hunting site or updating your profile on LinkedIn (which is highly recommended) a bit of SEO editing can help recruiters find you when they search these sites.
• Got a business but no website? If so, you may have already been picked up in Google Places, which shows local businesses for specific search results. If you want to get found more often, you should first claim your listing and then build up your profile with keyword-rich information. For instance, a painting contractor would add information about exterior and interior painting styles as well as low-VOC paints and anything else that would be of interest to someone looking for a local painter. Don’t forget to mention if you’re licensed, bonded, or insured, since there are people who look for those variations.
• Another big advantage for businesses is local listings in phone book directories and online yellow pages. Lots of people begin and end their searches in directories like Yelp and Yellowpages.com. Even though you may not have a lot of space to describe your business, you can put some good keywords in the mix. On top of that, people are encouraged to write reviews, so if you can get your customers to write more descriptive reviews you will get more keyword matches as well. As an example, someone reviewing a Chinese restaurant might write “the egg rolls and dim sum at the Panda Dragon Chinese Restaurant in Anytown are the best I’ve ever eaten.”

While it may make more sense to get links to your site from these places, you can always add a site in later once it is created. SEO for social media resources and phone book directories can go a long way toward getting preferential placement or just getting found. If you can make your presence known in the space of a couple of searches, then you are more likely to get the calls which either result in a new job or a new client. Even if you already have your own website, SEO of your off-site assets can increase your traffic from non-search-engine related sources and represent a nice cost savings over traditional marketing packages.

Many of our clients have been asking us about when Bing results will be visible on Yahoo. As of a few weeks ago, Yahoo has been testing Bing results for quality so periodically the user will be getting listings from Bing (based on MSN Live Search) instead of Yahoo’s in-house search engine. A recent article indicated that up to 25% or results on Yahoo come from Bing, so for people who get high volume traffic either from Bing or Yahoo, there can be a visible change in traffic from these engines.

Websites that have gotten better results on Bing (than Yahoo) historically are now noticing increased “Yahoo” traffic. Conversely, people who do poorly on Bing but well on Yahoo will notice an opposite effect. One of the key problems in preparing for Bing’s complete takeover of Yahoo search results is that Bing and Google have very similar ranking factors. Ordinarily, not much attention has been paid to Bing in search because it had the #3 share in the search market and hovered in the 10% range while Google still gets around 65% of the search engine market share. By adding Yahoo, this will make Bing a more important goal for SEO, but the problem with Bing SEO is that it is tougher to pin down despite its similarity to Google. We have seen cases where people have done very well in Google and Yahoo, but poorly in Bing, and the bulk of all major SEO companies will still be biased toward Google due to its market share. We have also seen quite a few cases where clients get great results in Bing and Google but suffer in Yahoo, so these customers will be the primary beneficiaries of the change.

What should you consider for Bing? First, you should look to your Google rankings. If you are doing well in Google, you should ask yourself how much you want to risk by making changes for what is still going to be the secondary combined presence in search. If you are not doing well in Google then this is an added reason to take more action. Overall, Bing uses link popularity and page content in the same way that Google does, but does not appear to filter links for quality in the same way. Therefore, low-quality links can do more for Bing results, but will either have a neutral or negative effect on Google rankings. Bing also appears to give more credit to keywords in URLs and domain names, and still has a certain preference for fresh content similar to MSN/Live search. Adding some new pages with a good descriptive URL structure may be one way to get more rankings on Bing, and as long as those pages are themed correctly, they will likely help in Google as well.

A big part of the agency-client relationship when it comes to SEO involves expectations. This is because we need to make sure that our clients understand that search optimization requires a certain level of commitment and action that may not be found in other advertising initiatives. For example, someone who wants to design a print ad or direct mail piece often will spend time on approving the final product, which is created with the agency’s software and machinery. For SEO, the process is a bit different, given the client’s need to make sure changes happen on their end, which may require the involvement of a third-party web designer.

With SEO, expectations are a two-way street. Customers should expect that the requisite keyword research and content creation should be done within a reasonable length of time, and they should expect search engine rankings to take a certain amount of time. In the past couple of years, we have seen rankings rise faster than previously, since the periodic “Google Dance” has been replaced with continuous spidering and updates. Still, many initiatives like link building require search engines to visit other sites, cache the results, and then change their listings. On top of this, competitive sectors take more time and energy to get rankings.

A great deal of this timeline is dependent on the client’s ability to make the site into an SEO-friendly presence and fix code issues that prevent proper optimization. If a site can’t be read by search engine spiders, or has sections that are impossible for engines to properly classify, then it is going to take longer before rankings come into fruition. In many cases hidden issues like duplicate content and bad code also come into play, and this often creates problems for the client who may not have the budget to make wholesale site improvements. We have seen cases where clients got a customized content management system that was not upgradeable without expensive programming, so the SEO suffered as a result.

With most SEO projects, depending on the service level, a customer should expect a timely site audit, creation of optimized code plus content for a specific number of pages, advice on fixing potential issues, and ongoing reporting. Periodic monitoring also comes with reporting. At Web.com Search Agency, we generally encourage our customers to add Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools so they can get a free third-party report card on how people interact with their sites, and how their search engine traffic is improving. Active customers should also expect timely updates if search algorithms change to the extent that an improvement to their site is necessary.

Setting the right expectation for an SEO project generally pays off when a contract is up for renewal, since a satisfied customer is likely to stick around longer and consider expanding the amount of pages/topics that may have a better chance in the search engines. When customers and SEO contacts understand what is expected on their side, they are also able to communicate the critical nature of the project to webmasters or decision makers. Because there are so many different website platforms and models out there, just about every SEO job is a custom project that requires in-depth analysis and recommendations. Because each site is unique, different problems are likely to crop up. (If a site is not unique, then that is a problem too!) The ability to remove SEO roadblocks quickly and position a site for success can bring a higher level of satisfaction to the customer relationship, in addition to the revenue and traffic created by a successful initiative.

Duplicate content can still be tough to deal with when you’re trying to optimize a website. Search engines may be reading several pages with substantially similar content, or “printer friendly” pages that generally contain the most important information on a page. They may also be seeing several versions of the same page, and (even in 2010) may be confused by the page at www.example.com vs. the one at example.com without the www. On top of that, someone else may be mirroring your content on another site, or pointing to your hosting address, and a search engine can index new content on that site before it ever reads yours.

Canonical tags, also known as canonical link elements, are one way to help straighten things out. They have been covered in a previous post, but in this case they can be a lifesaver when dealing with all the strange things that a search engine can do when it tries to figure out which pages to index and where.

For starters, it pays to have a self-referencing tag on each page of your site. If you prefer the www version of your site, then you should reference that in the tag itself. Even though it may seem redundant and unnecessary for pages to reference themselves with a canonical link element, the value of this approach pays off in cases where URLs are appended with tracking data, or other sites point to yours. In one case, we saw a company that had a collection of domain names based on common misspellings of their brand name. Each domain pointed to the main site (instead of 301 redirecting) and this was creating a hodgepodge of indexed pages. Since a canonical link element references the “true” URL, a search engine does not need to be confused, whether the domain in question is yours or not.

Duplicate content from printer friendly pages should be handled a bit differently, since you are basically referencing the actual page on the link element for the printer friendly one. Most webmasters handle printer friendly pages by segregating them in a directory of their own which is then disallowed by the robots.txt file. However, people sometimes link to printer-friendly pages, so it pays to tell the search engine where the spiderable content exists. There is also a belief in the SEO community that a canonical link element works like a “mini 301 redirect” so if this is true it makes sense to include this tag on any page that is duplicating content from elsewhere on your own site. Because these tags work across websites, you may also include the tag on pages that get syndicated or copied elsewhere.

The fight against duplicate content is an important one for any webmaster, since there are so many ways to inadvertently copy your own information elsewhere, even without having to deal with plagiarism and wholesale copying by competitors and scraper sites. Preventing and controlling content for a search engine also gives you site a more unified profile in the engines, and can be a distinct advantage when your content is stacked up against other sites which may have other factors in their favor, but aren’t organized in a way that a search engine can understand.