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SEO Checklist For The Holiday SeasonA 20-Point Checklist on Quick Launching Your Site Into the Thick of the Holiday Shopping Season!
We're rolling right into the 2008 holiday shopping season and it's time to soup up your site. A record $50 billion is predicted to be spent online this year, so there's mighty big profits to be had if your site is properly positioned to scoop them up.
The holiday shopping season traditionally runs from around Halloween (Oct. 31) to right before Christmas (Dec. 25) with online sales peaking around the second week of December. That means there's no time for major site overhauls—your best plan now is to put into motion a concise set of strategies to give your site the rankings boost it needs to bring in sales during the busiest online spending time of the year.
So let's dispense with theory and technical details and get down to the nitty-gritty of boosting your site's rankings fast. Remember, this stuff may not be sexy, it's just the stuff that works!
Whip Your Pages Into Shape
1. Make sure each of your pages has its own title, meta description and H1 header tag. Every page on your site are a potential landing page that can drive customer traffic.
Don't make the mistake of just optimizing your homepage—optimize all your product and/or service pages. At the minimum you need to be giving each page a unique and optimized title tag. And if you've got the time, optimize each of those pages from the top down.
2. Target the keywords that attract buyers, not browsers. Most customers start off their online buying cycle in the research phase, using non-specific keyword searches like laptop computer. But when it comes time to buy, those same customers know what they want and are now searching with highly specific phrases like Sony VAIO Digital Studio Laptop Computer.
It's those multi-keyword, highly-specific long tail searches that hit customers in the last stages of the buying cycle, right when they have their credit card in hand and are ready to make a purchase. And that's where most customers will be when the online shopping season peaks in early December. Don't neglect your other high-traffic pages and keywords, but make sure you also have pages optimized for those customers that are ready to buy now.
3. Fix your internal links. Are you still linking to your homepage with the keyword home? If so, you're wasting some of your best link firepower. The way you link your pages together matters. Whenever possible, link to your pages using the keywords you want those pages to be found for.
Build Some Authority Links
4. Grab a listing from DMOZ, the Yahoo Directory and Microsoft Live. These are the search engines' three favorite directories and they never fail to give a rankings boost. Sure, Yahoo costs $299 a year, but you stand to gain a lot more than that from the improved rankings you'll see in Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Live. For us, it's a no-brainer.
5. Get .edu, .gov and .mil links. A power boost to get PageRank and higher SERPs (search engine results page) results.
6. Mine your competitors' backlinks. Use Yahoo Site Explorer (YSE) to see who's linking to the top 20 sites that are ranking for your most sought after keywords. Set YSE to check inlinks from all pages except this domain. Site Explorer orders their results roughly according to importance of the link. So, by checking the first couple of pages returned, you'll get a pretty good idea of which links are helping a site rank.
7. Pay attention to the quality of those pages linking to your competition. Generally you'll be able to get a pretty good idea of whether the site is a good one just by looking at it. If it looks like crap, has tons of links to totally unrelated sites or appears to have been scraped together just to show AdSense ads, then it's probably not a good place to get a link from.
If the linking site's quality is not immediately obvious, then see how it stacks up against our list of quality indicators and our guide to evaluating link quality. Remember, you're trying to find the best sites linking to your competition so you can get them to link to you too.
8. Once you've found some potential link partners, make sure you check their incoming links too. One of the best ways to determine if a site is a good place to get a link from is to see who links to them. The better their links are (i.e. more authoritative and on-topic), the better a link from them will be for you.
Here's an example:
Let's say your top keyword is aromatherapy. Ranking in the top spot in Google is aromaweb.com. If you look at their links in Yahoo Site Explorer, you'll see they have links from Wikipedia, the Yahoo Directory, DMOZ and the Tufts University Library. Those are all high-quality, authoritative links, so it's no wonder aromaweb.com is doing so well. If your goal was to rank first for aromatherapy you'd want to get links from those sites too.
But what about those other sites linking to aromaweb.com? How do we know which of these sites are good candidates to get a link from and which are just a waste of time? Easy—we see who is linking to them.
Take this page from holisticmed.com. It comes up as one of aromaweb.com's top links. If you check holisticmed.com's links in Yahoo, you'll find at least five .edu links. As we've often mentioned, .edu links tend to be very trusted links, so a lot of trust is getting sent to holisticmed.com. That trust is in turn getting passed on to aromaweb.com.
So, you can see that by taking link analysis one step further...
...you can not only find out which links are going to be the most powerful, but you can also stir up a whole bunch of other sites that might be good places to get links from. The trick is to get links from sites that have their own authoritative incoming links (.edu and .gov, Yahoo Directory and DMOZ listings, industry leaders, .etc...)
9. When doing competitive link analysis, don't just stick with one search engine and don't just stick with your most important keywords. Let's say you find 20 good places to get links from by looking at who's linking to the top ranking sites in Google for your most important keywords. Well, if you do the same checks for the top ranking sites in Yahoo and Windows Live you could triple that number.
And if you branched out into the top ranking sites for a larger number of related keywords then you could be looking at literally hundreds of influential sites to get links from.
10. Once you've exhausted your competitors' incoming links, you can do the same thing with your category in the Google Directory. The nice thing about the Google Directory is that it lists pages according to PageRank, so it gives you a quick overview of where the best sites might be.
Keep in mind that the PageRank listed in the Google Directory is sometimes a bit out of date (and there are better ways to determine site quality besides PageRank) so use this feature just as a general guideline, not a hard-and-fast rule. But when quickly scanning for good link sources it's a great resource.
11. Make sure that what looks like a good link doesn't have hidden drawbacks. Before deciding if a site is a good place to get a link from, it's a good idea to check that they're not linking out to too many off-topic or spammy sites. Use the Windows Live LinkFromDomain command to see who they're linking to.
12. Finally, in order for the link to be found by the search engine, make sure it's not a nofollow link, redirected link, JavaScript link or has a noindex, nofollow meta tag at the top of the page. Yahoo Site Explorer will often include these types of links in their link reports, so you've got to check for yourself.
13. Then it's up to you to determine whether or not you can get a link from that page. If you found the page by checking your competitor's incoming links, the next step is to determine what kind of link your competitor has on that page:
Those are some of the easier and most common scenarios. On the more challenging side, the site may have linked to your competitor because they have some personal or business relationship with each other. In that case, getting a link can be trickier than just paying for it or writing an email asking them to link to you. Also, keep in mind that sites which directly compete with your business are unlikely to link to you. Look for sites which complement but don't compete with your own.
14. Make a list of the best links you find, along with how much work/expense it's going to be to get that link. Obviously, you'll want the best return for the smallest effort. Organize your potential links from best to worst and start contacting those sites. Depending on the site, you may have to pay, provide content, or (worst case) swap links.
If you're extremely lucky, all you'll need to do is ask nicely. When you ask, whatever you do, don't go SEO-nuts on them and start babbling on about PageRank and search engines. Just let them know you're either:
a) interested in purchasing advertising on their site,
b) would like to write an article for them, or c) simply feel your site would make a great resource for their readers. Again, strive for links from the highest quality sites and avoid skewing your link profile with too many of one kind of link.
15. Create some viral content. Getting your site front-page placement on the top social media sites can easily result in hundreds of exceedingly good natural links. Study the type of pages that are getting to the top of Digg and Del.icio.us and see if you can create something similar.
These social media-generated links are among the best links you can get, but if you're in a hurry then focus on the other kinds of links mentioned above first. It can often take several attempts before you score a hit on social media sites, so don't burn up all your link building time trying to get to the top of Digg. (Unless, of course, you've got some really killer idea for a resource or article up your sleeve. If so, then have at it.)
16. Grab some low-hanging link fruit. Squidoo and Wikipedia both have easy ways to add your links to authoritative domains. As long as you use some tact and either create good content (Squidoo) or link to good content (Wikipedia) there's no reason not to pick up these easy authoritative links.
17. Niche Directories. These are links that most sites overlook. Not every product has a good niche directory to submit to, but generally a search for "your keyword" + directory will turn up some niche directories that apply to your site's topic. For example, to find a niche directory to list a site about model airplanes, do the following search in Google: "model airplane" + directory. Or you can use this niche directory guide.
Go After Some Easy Links
18. Remember to make use of those article directory and press release links we cover in our link building quick start guide. Just don't add too many of these links too fast (we cover just what too fast means in the guide) and, again, make sure your link balance doesn't get out of whack.
And also remember that these links are the links that everyone can get. They help, but the very, very best links come from analyzing your competitors' backlinks and doing your own research to find those links that aren't easy to get. However, you can actually turn these just so-so links into truly useful links if you pay attention to who is reprinting your articles and press releases and work out arrangements with those sites to provide them unique content with your links embedded.
19. If all your other link building efforts have been a bust, there's always links pages. These are less and less effective, but can still provide a boost; particularly if the site the links page is on has some pretty good links of its own or is on a .edu or .gov domain.
Grab That Easy Traffic You're Missing Out On
20. Add some new pages. If you've already got some fabulous incoming links, chances are very good you could be ranking for many more searches than you currently are. Use WordTracker and the Overture keyword tool to discover which keywords actually have enough searches to make them worth targeting, then create some pages for them. Most sites miss out on a huge amount of traffic simply because they haven't created enough pages. If you need some content created quickly, check out Rentacoder, an easy way to outsource article writing.
21. Make the most of your existing high traffic pages. By adding keyword modifiers to some of the links pointing at your highest traffic pages, you can significantly increase your search engine placement and customer traffic. For instance, you might rank number one in Google for hot sauce, but do you rank number one for hot sauces? What about buy hot sauce or best hot sauce? Those are all high-traffic searches you could be missing out on.
Now it's usually not a good idea to modify your top traffic pages, since you've already hit on the formula that's gotten them into top positions. Changing your title tags or radically altering your content at this point could hurt your rankings. But you can still get your existing high-traffic pages ranked for more queries through the magic of optimizing your incoming link anchor text.
In other words, whenever you build a new incoming link, mix up the anchor text. Try getting a few links that say buy hot sauce, best hot sauce, or other variations. Not only will this help your page rank for more keywords, but it will also make your incoming links look more natural.
Sleigh Bells Ring, Are Ya Listening...
Ed Kundahl |
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