I am often approached by prospective clients who want to achieve top search engine rankings in time to capitalize on the holiday shopping season. Even in this year’s tough economy, online merchandise sales have increased by 10%. The growth of online shopping, or ecommerce, is without a doubt the fastest growing method of commerce. In order to successfully take advantage of the holiday season marketplace, businesses need to plan way ahead of time. Depending on your area of business, you may need to be moving forward on your SEO plans now in order to reach the rankings you need to succeed for next years holiday shopping frenzy.

Not every business expects the holiday season to be the height of their annual sales. There are many companies that experience seasonal trends to their sales. An ecommerce website that sells suntan lotion probably isn’t going to do as well in December as in June. However, there is still going to be some qualified traffic searching for these products at all times of the year. Having great search engine rankings is the best way to get a strong share of the available online sales. Once strong rankings have been achieved through a solid search engine optimization (SEO) effort, websites can expect to improve on their historically successful seasons. Equally as important, these businesses can expect to increase their sales during times of the year that are traditionally slower for their industry.

The feds finally made official what most of us felt early last year. Marketing experts wrote about “How to run a business in a recession” in January 2008. Now, a year later, we are all looking at the world through recession-colored glasses. Marketing budgets are slashed or eliminated. We know; we work in marketing.

Take off the glasses and come out of the fog. Web marketing remains the most cost-efficient tactic you have in your toolbox. It’s time to squeeze the most you can out of the web – in fact, there is no better time than now. Your clients and customers need to hear from you now, more than ever.

One way to reach out is by adding a blog to your existing web site. Just like this one. A blog can be about any aspect of your business, updated frequently (once a week is ideal), and as fresh as this morning’s coffee. A blog gives you the chance to speak personally and directly to your audience about what is going on in any aspect of the world in which you do business. Blog updates also give you an excuse to contact your email-marketing list with a message, which drives traffic to your site.

Plus, a well-crafted blog will help elevate your search-engine rankings. An experienced business blogger will include key words about current topics that your customer base may be searching for. That’s the blog bonus.

Here’s one consequence of not keeping in close touch with your clients and customers during a recession. An email recently made the rounds discouraging people from buying gift cards for their holiday giving, listing a number of stores that it claimed were going out of business by the end of 2008. Much of the information in the email was bogus or incomplete – in fact, it neglected to clarify that some of those businesses were closing locations while opening others. (Read the email and the Snopes.com report).

Bogus or not, imagine the impact if that email was the only communication your customers had about you during the holidays?

Anytime in the month of January is the appropriate time to post a 2009 message on your own business blog. Remind your customers that you are there for them, recession or not.

A colleague recently posted on Facebook that she was, sadly and after many years of devotion, no longer a loyal customer of a certain big box retailer. She was refused the right to return an item for even a store credit, for what was apparently a policy not even the store manager understood.

When you, a small business working to promote your online services, products or real-world storefront, hear a story like this, your wheels should be turning. You can compete with mega-stores because you have something they will never have: the ability to take care of each and every customer as a unique and important individual. You’ve got the opportunity every day to to market directly to your competition’s customers – but even more importantly, you have the chance to catch the golden moment a dissatisfied mega-store customer declares, “I’m NEVER shopping at there again!”

Here’s how you can swoop in and save the day:

- Extend a price matching offer. It doesn’t have to be on every item in your store. It can be on a certain product line, or for a limited period of time. It’s a lure you are dangling in front of a customer who is ready to bite out of sheer frustration.

- Publicize your niche. Go after the customer who wants that one special thing that you do SO much better than a big box retail chain. They’ll love your personalized attention. They just need to know you are there.

- Shout your success. Post your favorite customer stories that illustrate how choosing you over a mega-store made it a win-win.

- Blog, blog, blog. Write every week about your competitive advantage, share a story, talk up a new product, make a special offer to anyone who mentions the blog.

All those dissatisfied customers have been desensitized to what it means to be actually “served” in a retail establishment. Give them a wake up call. Let it be you that gets their attention.

Many people in marketing, myself among them, feel the best advertising campaigns incorporate a variety of marketing methods. By utilizing a multifaceted approach not only can you effectively reach a wider audience but you often augment the other types of marketing efforts you are making use of.

One great combination of tools to use is search engine optimization and press releases. Search engine optimization alone can be an extremely effective way of bringing targeted web traffic to your site. Press releases do a great job one their own of letting people know about whatever is exciting or new at your company.

When you make use of both of these advertising tools together, the press release can enhance the performance of the search engine optimization effort. By sending out interesting, news worthy press releases you are creating off page content. If you did the release properly, then you have anchor text hyperlinks to specific pages of your website. A successful press release can be a very effective tool in link building for a website. If the story is really news worthy this can have a huge impact on an SEO campaign as many major news outlets may run with the story.

Think about what your business has happening that is new and exciting. If you have an SEO campaign underway, a press release may be a great way to go for you.

I am often asked by clients who engage our SEO services, “What can I do to help?”.
There are, of course, many things that can be done by clients, but for this blog post I would like to address the crucial SEO tools of link building.

We have done and continue to do SEO work for a huge range of business types. These businesses need to remember that they are the experts in their respective fields. We are the SEO experts.

So unless you are an SEO firm looking for our services (don’t laugh – it happens more than you think) you should know your business better than we do.  What I mean by this is you should have long standing relationships that have been built throughout your career within your business genre.  There are almost always link building opportunities to leverage from within this group of professional relationships. Vendors, distributors, and even customers to name a few, almost always have websites that might make for an ideal link.

One reminder though, once you have thought of a possible candidate website to go for a link from, check with your SEO team first. Just because you can get a link to your website from another doesn’t mean you should. Let your search engine optimization experts at Tempo Creative decide if the link is of value and how best to leverage it for the SEO campaign.

I recently spoke with a prospective client who wanted their website to rank on the first page for a fairly competitive keyword. They had it in their heads that they could help boost their rankings by adding a blog to their site. Not a bad idea, or is it?

OK, of course a blog can be a huge benefit to the search engine optimization efforts of any website. There is, after all,  a reason I am taking the time to write the content you are currently reading. But, can a blog hurt your rankings? You bet it can. There is an old saying: “Anything worth doing is worth doing right”. This applies perfectly to websites that are considering adding a blog to their offerings. Here is a quick list of 5 things to think about, in no particular order, if you are considering adding a blog to increase your search engine rankings:

• Frequency of Blog Posts: How often will you take the time to post content to you blog. I have come across a number of blogs that seem to get a post up on the website about twice a year. That is not exactly a way to build up any sort of readership and isn’t likely to add much benefit to your SEO efforts either.

• Commitment: Bloggers often come out swinging, but then can’t go the distance. They tend to post a good bit of content in the beginning and then stop. Maybe it’s because they run out of ideas to blog about or maybe they get bored. Either way these blogs quickly lose their interest from readers and search engines alike.

• Poor Code: A blog is still a web page. If you don’t know how to use meta descriptions, keywords, title tags etc.. then you aren’t going to get your pages crawled effectively by the search engines. Another coding issue with blogs can be the way your URLs are written. Let’s use WordPress for an example. WordPress is a very common blogging platform, and a good one at that. However, the default permalink structure doesn’t allow for any keywords to be used in the URL. There are simple fixes to remedy this, but you have to be aware of these problems before you can address them. Poorly coded websites do not often achieve impressive search engine rankings.

• Security Issues: There seems to be an endless number of blogs on the internet that either don’t have any security or really lazy adminstrators. Take a look at some of the comments that get approved on these blogs. Is it any surprise that you won’t get strong search engine rankings for your page when the comments are full of spam links? It is important to take the time to read the comments and make sure that they are appropriate for the content of the page. If you do choose to publish links from user comments, they had better be to legitimate pages of relevant content.

• Quality Content: Write blog posts that are relevant to the purpose of your website and will be of some value to your sites visitors. If this means waiting until you have something worthwhile or entertaining to say then wait. Poor content will lower the online reputation of your blog to both visitors and search engines.

Just because someone said you should have a blog on your site doesn’t mean you should run blindly forward with this effort. Having a poorly coded, infrequently updated, blog that is full of useless content and spam will make for a perfect anchor, pulling your site right to the bottom of the search engine rankings.

I was recently listening to a report on the radio that was explaining the drop in television audience numbers and the corresponding drop in revenue from advertising sales. As it turns out, television isn’t the only traditional adverting medium that has been losing steam. Print advertising has been reported to be down as much as 14 percent in the first quarter of 2008 alone. Many would argue that its is a sign of our struggling economy and that spending is down in many areas. While there is probably some truth to this, the state of the economy is only a part of the cause. The major influence in the decline of traditional advertising is the internet.

More of the population is switching to the world wide web for many of the activities they used to partake in elsewhere. Reading the newspaper with your morning coffee is now more commonly done online. Watching television programming and renting movies, yep online too. It should really come as no surprise that as the numbers erode from these markets so does the value of advertising within them. As these trends continue, more and more advertising resources are being used in various online marketing campaigns.

While there are many options that can offer a solid return on one’s advertising dollar, I strongly feel that organic search engine optimization is the best place to start. Having a website that is properly optimized for best results in the search engines rankings benefits your business directly. Receiving more visits from targeted traffic is an obvious step in the right direction. However, if you are making use of other internet advertising methods you will generally find that a pre existing SEO effort will augment the effectiveness of those methods as well.

I was recently listening to a report on the radio that was explaining the drop in television audience numbers and the corresponding drop in revenue from advertising sales. As it turns out, television isn’t the only traditional adverting medium that has been losing steam. Print advertising has been reported to be down as much as 14 percent in the first quarter of 2008 alone. Many would argue that its is a sign of our struggling economy and that spending is down in many areas. While there is probably some truth to this, the state of the economy is only a part of the cause. The major influence in the decline of traditional advertising is the internet.

More of the population is switching to the world wide web for many of the activities they used to partake in elsewhere. Reading the newspaper with your morning coffee is now more commonly done online. Watching television programming and renting movies, yep online too. It should really come as no surprise that as the numbers erode from these markets so does the value of advertising within them. As these trends continue, more and more advertising resources are being used in various online marketing campaigns.

While there are many options that can offer a solid return on one’s advertising dollar, I strongly feel that organic search engine optimization is the best place to start. Having a website that is properly optimized for best results in the search engines rankings benefits your business directly. Receiving more visits from targeted traffic is an obvious step in the right direction. However, if you are making use of other internet advertising methods you will generally find that a pre existing SEO effort will augment the effectiveness of those methods as well.