Christmas is only around the corner, and next month the Christmas season increase in traffic, for particularly e-commerce sites, will start. Therefore, now is the time to get your website ready for all those online Christmas shoppers! This article gives you a few ideas about what you should be doing immediately in order to maximise traffic from search engines over the festive season.

There are many things you really should be taking care of now with regards to increasing your websites visibility over the festive season. Below a few online marketing ideas, and a 10 point checklist on things you might want to check over.

It is at this time that marketing managers should be thinking of special offers for the festive period. It can be anything such as ætwo for the price of oneÆ or a limited time discount, or a Christmas specific product, or even some kind of competition with a prize. Whatever you decide to do, it gives you a fantastic opportunity to create new pages for your website. This of course enables you to optimize those new special offer pages for search terms your existing pages may not cover. The more æSpecial offerÆ pages you can add, the better. In my experience, most webmasters add Christmas offer content to existing pages, a paragraph or two about their special Christmas offer just at the time the offer starts. This a big mistake.

Uploading Christmas offer pages well over a month before the festive season causes a little bit of a dilemma in that the offer may well not have started yet. What you need to do is get the pages up now, however, if the offer doesnÆt start until say December, simply add something like ôOur forthcoming Christmas offer starting onàö or simply ôSpecial Christmas offer starts soonö or suchlike. It is however imperative you get the pages up now, or else the search engine spiders are not going to index your new content and rank it in time to be found during the Christmas online shopping period.

Use these new pages to add secondary keywords to your website. For example, if you sell DVDs online, and have optimized on your existing pages for ôDVDs onlineö, ôDVD online shopö and ôDVD filmsö. You might want to make sure your new pages include some other search terms such as ônew DVD releasesö, ôDV

D Moviesö, ôDiscount DVDsö etc. From a search engine optimization perspective, The period  before Christmas gives you a golden opportunity to get found on terms you werenÆt previously found on. In short, develop Christmas offer pages optimized for terms you are not currently found on that are of course relevant to your site.

Creating new web pages for new keywords should not by the way just be limited to Christmas, but for whenever you have a special offer for one or more  products/services.

The above covers the creation of Christmas special offer pages, but as you have your HTML editor now open, take the time to check that your existing pages are also up to scratch as far as search engine optimization is concerned. Below a 10 point Christmas SEO checklist:

1. Is your product name and related main search terms in the title tag e.g. <title>Keyword rich title</title>
2. Do you have your main search terms in the visible text at least 3 times.
3. Are you linking from your other internal pages to your product pages with keyword rich link text e.g. <a href="http://www.yourdomain/product-page.htm">Product or Keyword</a>
4. Are you using the Alt attribute on images to add your main search terms.
5. Have you recently tried to gain links from other websites. If not, do so now.
6. Can you exchange existing graphic text(image) for normal text anywhere on your pages.
7. Can you add text to those pages that currently have very little.
8. Have you made sure you have different meta descriptions for EVERY page.
9. Do you have a site map to assist search engine spiders in finding your pages.
10. Have you checked that those linking to you, are doing so with the optimum link text (anchor text).

There is no better time than now to get the HTML editor out than now. Tweaking your site for the Christmas search traffic can increase your online revenue more than you might imagine.

If you would like to know more about search engine optimization, check out my 15 page tutorial on the subject here [http://www.abakus-internet-marketing.de/en/seo-tutorial/grundlag.htm].

I hope this article has at least given you some food for thought. Too often Christmas creeps up on you and often its too late for webmasters to make the most out of the increase in searchers looking to buy something. DonÆt let it happen to you this year!