Search Engine Optimization Tips: Holiday Edition

by Sarah Kimmel on October 21st, 2010 | 1 Comment »

With Halloween quickly approaching the amount of searches for Halloween related items increases considerably. So what is the best way to increase your traffic, and take advantage of the spike in holiday related searches?

Three Tips for Search Engine Optimization

1. Plan Ahead. If you think you are going to be able to increase your traffic for Halloween this year, think again. It takes a bit of time for the search engines to index your items and have them show up in the search results. Right now, I'd be thinking more along the lines of Valentine's Day traffic. So make sure you get your holiday posts out there early. You can still post about Halloween right now, but don't expect the search engine traffic until at least next year.

2. Title, Title, Title. I can't stress titles enough when it comes to SEO. The title of your post is one of the most important things to be keyword rich. The other things you need to title are the pictures that you have included in the post. If it's a post about Halloween crafts, then you need to title the photo halloweencraft.jpg or even more descriptive than that like dolphinhalloweencostume.jpg. Many people do image searches when looking for crafts or other holiday related recipes. If your image is titled appropriately, it will show up in the Google image search and get your post and your blog out there for people to find!

3. Know What Are People Searching. Whenever I write a post about anything, I think to myself: "If I wanted to find the information in this article, what would I search for in Google?" Once I have the particular phrase that Iwould use, then I go to the keyword tool and type in that particular search phrase. What's great about the tool is that it will then give me suggestions of other phrases. Sometimes the phrase I came up with has a high number of searches and I will just go ahead and use my initial phrase. Sometimes it has very low searches, but a similar phrase has a higher search count. Then I will include that phrase in my title and a couple of times throughout my post.

So while it may be beneficial for you, next year, to talk about Halloween right now, you may want to start thinking about some cool Valentine's ideas! Good luck and happy searching!