The wisdom of this is obvious for retail sites, after all it’s the busiest time of the year. But what about business-to-business? As retail prepares for an income boost, B2B gets ready for an inevitable slump.

The Internet doesn’t close for Christmas, so it’s worth considering what can be done on-line, either to maximise the seasonal peak or ride out the festive trough. Now’s a very good time to overhaul the Website to make sure it does the best job possible over those crucial months.

Your position in the search engines springs to mind as an obvious issue here. Anything you do is unlikely to make an overnight improvement in your listings; building your ranking is a slow process that typically takes months. Which is why you need to be thinking about this right now. To achieve the best results possible you need to put a tick in all the important boxes; miss out an element and you’re groping in the dark.

But let’s be clear: you need to get started straight away. If Christmas is your main selling period – or if it’s when your cash-flow takes a dive - then you need to be climbing the rankings in the next two months to be in position to build your business. So start your search engine optimisation now.

The Peril of Duplicate Content

Perversely, your best efforts to improve your listings could be to no avail because Google isn’t even looking at your site. This isn’t to do with submitting to the search engines, it’s a quirk of Google’s algorithm that can leave people baffled why their site isn’t being found.

If Google finds two sites with near-identical content, then it’s likely to ignore one of them as a copy. It may even ignore both. It’s worth copying a string of unique text from your Website and pasting it into Google. This could reveal an unauthorised copy somewhere that’s not only infringing your copyright, it could be damaging your search engine ranking!

But it’s possible for your own site to appear to Google as a duplicate of itself. This phenomenon, known as a canonical domain, occurs when typing the domain with or without www at the start points directly to the same location. Google sees the two addresses as discrete but identical Websites. It’s quite easy to correct this problem by creating a permanent redirect from one version of the domain to the other.

Keyword Clean-up

Think about how you use search. Most people now have wised-up to the fact that the best results come back if they search for a short phrase, or even a fairly detailed description of what they’re looking for. Yet those same people try to grab search engine real estate with single keywords, putting themselves hopelessly into competition with millions of other sites – many of which aren’t even their competitors.

So take the time to put some real thought into the phrases that appear on your site. Don’t try to make a single page into a candidate for half a dozen phrase; the key to having Google understand what your pages are about is to specialise.

Build Links Slowly

It’s fairly widely known that Google bases much of its judgement of a site’s authority on the number, type and quality of links pointing to it. As a result, many companies have opted for the route of acquiring vast numbers of incoming links. And a few of them have paid the price of trying to fool the search engines.

In recent months we’ve seen a number of major on-line organisations – including two front-line insurance companies – blacklisted by Google. In their battle for position for high competition terms like “car insurance” they’d been a little too overt in acquiring links.

This highlights an axiom for anyone who wants to build long-lasting rankings in Google: Give the search engines what they really want.

Google isn’t operated by idiots. They know exactly what tricks site operators pull to try to fool their algorithms, and they’re getting better every day at spotting the perpetrators. A link to your site should be granted because the linking Website operator believes you have something of interest to its visitors, not because you paid someone $20 for a listing.

So don’t launch into a programme to build a thousand new links a month. Think about creating news stories that could be syndicated, look for related sites that carry material that’s relevant to your area. Link-building is still an important element of search engine ranking development, but quality is now far outranking quantity.

Examine The Statistics

Finally, take a long, hard look at exactly what your visitors are doing. If you don’t have a statistics package on your site, get one. Google Analytics is free and does a fine job. And if you do have stats available – use them! Don’t hide behind “I’ve had a look, but I didn’t really understand them”. Spend half an hour or so and you’ll soon start to get what they’re telling you. And when you do get it, make changes. Tweak your site until every visitor is giving you maximum value.

If you start all this now, while the sun’s still shining (UK readers can ignore that last phrase), you’ll be in better shape this Christmas than you were last year.

…and may we be the first to say it: Merry Christmas.

One of the UK’s leading search engine optimisation experts is concerned that only 14% of companies reported that they had thought about how their website would be found on the Internet before they built it.

Head of XSEO, Matt Paines, believes that companies are wasting their money if they do not build websites so they can be found by search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

“Good foundations underpin the potential success of any website,” said Matt. “And it is vital that every website is built so it can be as search engine friendly as possible.

“In the same way a building will fall down if it no has foundations, a website is rendered invisible on the Internet if it is not built in a way that allows it to be easily signposted online.

“Companies still seem to see the appearance, content and functionality of their website as a priority, when in fact arguably the single-most important consideration is having a search engine friendly design.”

“If it came down to a simple choice, I’m sure every business would rather have a mediocre looking website which attracts lots of visitors, than one that is stunning but nobody can find it on the Internet.”

XSEO conducted the research at February’s Technology For Marketing Show (TFM) Search Clinic at Olympia London and Paines, who is one of only two Microsoft Search Engine champs in the UK, was astounded that in this day and age so few companies put SEO on the agenda at the planning stage of a website’s construction.

“For many years we, along with other SEO’s, and search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) have been trying to re-educate web designers to consider search engines and how they navigate websites.”

“Building search engine friendly or accessible websites is not complicated, in fact it’s relatively easy,” he said. “Search engines use simple programs – which are commonly known as robots or spiders - that crawl the Internet looking for websites and their content. If they can access a website they can begin assessing the relevance to any given search.

The search engines use computer programs (often called robots or spiders) that crawl the internet looking for websites and their content. Once this data is collected it is processed and it forms the basis for the search engines to derive the sites relevance to any given search. Being search engine friendly allows them to enter the site and read the content. So conversely having a site that does not give the crawlers access to the readable text will prohibit them from understanding the sites content thereby, destroying any ability of being ranked highly in a search for a product or service.

“It’s a shame,” he added. “That so many companies waste huge amounts of money on websites, many have bought into the idea that the Internet offers untold riches, but fail to understand that a website is not the end of the story.”

He went on to remark that basic marketing principles are often not adhered to. “The results from the TFM Clinic demonstrated that simple planning and consideration regarding target audience and means of attraction are still being disregarded. Given that for media time, the Internet is catching up with that of television, ignoring how they will be found on the Internet and the real measure of its success online will be the nail in the coffin of many companies”

For more information visit www.xseo.com/pitfalls.htm