Is it too Late for Christmas SEO?

Well, that depends, if you are a well established site, probably not – and if you already rank highly for your key search terms, you might be able to get a few quickies in if you are in a niche market.

Most companies which concentrate on seasonal SEO are Consumer Products and Retail (CP&R) verticals, but other areas such as financial services and health care can still bump up traffic during November and December. Of course, e-commerce sites will always need a big Christmas push to break even.

SEO should be tailored to fit the holiday season. Seasonal promotional pages and products should be built with the intent to stay live all year long, building authority and consistency with the search engines. You can do targeted advertising during peak season to drive traffic. Done properly, it shouldn’t take long for the pages to rank for terms on their own.

During the holidays many new pages are introduced that have some sort of holiday focus. Adding content specific to the event can increase the possibility of links  from holiday news articles, blog posts, and forums.  Press releases and articles geared to the holiday can also booost links to your holiday themed content. All links must be high quality to make a difference in time for Christmas 2009.

Directories with holiday categories, may accept additional site listings for relevant pages not already in the directory. Look up links from previous years’ holidays, and ask Webmasters to update these links to point to your latest content.

Holiday SEO performance depends heavily on how well the site is positioned to be able to rank well for new pages. Creating static pages from a URL perspective that can be updated annually is a good idea.

Last note – when updating for Christmas, don’t forget New Year Resolution traffic!