It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

by Herndon Hasty on 05/29/2009 at 2:48 pm in Online Strategies, SEO, SEO Best Practices

Getting winded trying to keep up with Google’s latest and greatest offerings?

Well, don’t take your Nikes off just yet. Google recently announced a slate of updates and new developments, including ways to make your search results prettier and a new emphasis on fresh content. For those who’ve been encouraging clients to add microformats to their pages, you should feel a little vindicated, because these should be right up your alley. If that’s not enough, MSN also announced that they’re updating and rebranding Live Search, naming the concept Bing (previously known as Kumo) and gearing it towards behavioral search. If it works like they say it will, then we’ll have something to celebrate before July 4.

So that’s some good news for the summer, but it’s more applicable for the winter. In terms of development, it’s time to start work (or at least planning) on site enhancements for the 2009 holiday season!

‘But it’s not even June!’ you might be thinking. Just remember to take into account a few important factors:

• Your Site Will be Untouchable in 4 -5 Months: Typically, large ecommerce sites go into a code freeze in October or early November at the absolute latest. A code freeze is a period of time where developers can work on site enhancements, but can’t actually push anything live for anything less than a life-or-death emergency in order to make sure that the site isn’t knocked out by errors at a critical time of year. So, in reality, it’s more like August rather than June on your production schedule.
• Development Takes Time: The planning, pre-development legwork, development and eventual launch of changes to your site – SEO or otherwise – is a long process. Depending on your team and your process, you’re looking from two to six months just to get even simple, natural search-affecting changes made to the site. If you try to start making massive changes to your site in August, you could very easily wind up seeing your Holiday 2009 ambitions coming up sometime next March without some serious overtime or help.
• Search Engines Take Time: If SEO gains are even part of your goal, once you’ve made improvements to your site that are meant to improve your natural search results and seen them pushed live, you’re at the mercy of the engines. It can take anywhere from two days to four weeks to get your changes indexed, and another six to twelve weeks of fluctuations as Google, Yahoo and MSN fully digest your changes and start really advancing your positions.

If you start counting backwards from December with these in mind, Santa’s shadow looms pretty large.

Now is the time to start making your list and checking it twice. Start by looking at your holiday keyword and content strategy, building out your gift pages, fixing any leaks in your natural search potential and getting your site ready to rank for potentially the toughest holiday season in decades. Be a good boy / girl now, and you could find yourself with the kinds of gifts we’ve all been asking for all year: Revenue, growth, and a shot at Holiday 2010.