Catching Seasonal Sales

There are a number of big sales times during the year, such as Christmas. Webmasters who rely on PPC search engines to promote the sale are missing valuable traffic from regular search engines.

Keep Them
Most webmasters put the seasonal pages up for 3 to 4 weeks, then take them off when the season is over. You might get the pages indexed quickly by using blog and RSS, but 3-4 weeks is too short a time frame for any SEO. (Being "indexed" and getting higher rankings are different things.) Instead of deleting pages afterwards, make those pages permanent and let search engine spiders crawl over them all year round. In that way, you'll have lots of time for SEO. To do so, you need one link pointing to each seasonal page. Of course, you don't link to seasonal pages from the home page when the season is over. Instead, link to them from the bottom of the site-map page or from somewhere else.

Keywords
It is a no brainer to optimize the seasonal pages with red, hot seasonal keywords, like "Valentine's gifts," but finding hot keywords is tricky. Because seasonal keywords are used often only during the season, you won't see any soon-to-be hot keyword on top of the chart if you use keyword advice tools before the season starts. You need to keep a record of hot keywords every season. Then, use that data to guess what will be hot for the next season.

Say No
Letting search engines crawl over your seasonal pages all the time means some internet surfers will also find the pages anytime of the year. If people find the pages, they will think you can deliver products on time whatever the date is. When there isn't enough time for on-time delivery, don't forget to tell visitors you cannot deliver. Or, you can temporally disable the ordering process on the seasonal pages.