It's a good idea to put a development freeze in place from now until the end of the year, to make sure your sites are performing well and won't go down due to tinkering during the busy holiday shopping season. While you're waiting to put out any new releases, consider investing more effort into other forms of marketing that may have an indirect impact on your overall SEO coverage.
Many of us have been waiting for “Cyber Monday” to come around and show its colors. The Monday after the Thanksgiving weekend is, of course, the online shopping version of “Black Friday,” where brick & mortar stores offer deep discounts to kick off the holiday shopping season.
As this is such an important time of year for e-commerce companies and a key indicator of how well the rest of the quarter is going to run, we must be very careful of how sites are maintained and operated during such times.
I’ve written several times in the past about how overall site performance is a very important factor in your organic search campaigns and paid search efforts. Search engines like Google are trying very hard to maintain a level of quality that their users expect.
A heavy load can lead to a degradation of user experience and will cause your paid ads and natural search rankings to vanish. Thus, enforcing a development moratorium is a great idea to make sure that the sites are performing well and won’t go down over tinkering.
Most large sites that work under Sarbanes-Oxley, or SOX, compliance won’t allow any changes to be pushed to the Web site from Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, up until the end of the year, with all changes being backed up until a large release on January 1.
While you’re waiting to put out any new releases, consider investing more effort into other forms of marketing that may have an indirect impact on your overall SEO coverage. Videos can be a great source for driving visitors. Videos may drive a ton of traffic if the content is intriguing enough.
When selecting your subject matter, don’t make the video into a product advertisement. Take an example from Will it Blend? None of their videos initially tried to sell anything. You would never see anything about buying their blenders, but their compelling content drove 40 million dollars in blender sales.
The key to placement: don’t just upload the video to YouTube and let it go. Upload the video, tag it appropriately, and make sure the words you use are related to the information about your video and not fancy marketing terms that no one looks at.
Imagine the difference between having a billboard in Times Square versus a cornfield in the middle of the country. Search keywords are very important to consider.
After you post your video, make sure to write about it in a blog post and make sure to embed the material in the post. If you’re sure this video is compelling enough, post it to Digg and see how people respond to it.
Simply creating 30 accounts and Digging your same post on your machine will be seen as spam — don’t abuse it, it’s a waste of your time. If anything, ask your friends to consider Digging the video. If they think the video stinks, no one else will Digg it, and it will get buried.
Consistency is very important. You should always try to convey a message from the same person. This will drive trust to the person and can possible drive a consistent level of viewers to come back and see your antics time and time again.
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