By Crystal Silvas

The buzz around the Web seems to be dancing around holiday marketing. I know it may seem premature to some of you out there, but it really isn’t. Yes, I realize that the stores are just now rolling out the Halloween candy, and Christmas and Hanukkah are months away, but if you want your search terms to be ranking during the holidays, you better start preparing for the season now. Besides, being prepared for this exceptionally busy time is a great way to help alleviate some of the stress associated with this time of year.

Let’s face it: Life can get hectic during this time of year. That’s why it’s so important to get started early. All of the great holiday specials and advertisements in the world won’t help your site’s traffic during this busy time if you haven’t adequately prepared. We all know that search engine rankings don’t happen overnight, so it’s imperative that you take a proactive approach to get your holiday terms and specials ranking during the holidays rather than after when it’s too late. That’s why you should start in September. This is the time you should be optimizing some of your text, page titles and headers for search terms that performed well for you last Christmas. Do your research!

Unfortunately, most keyword research tools only provide data for the last thirty to ninety days, so if you research holiday keywords now you’re not likely to get very accurate results; not many people out there search for holiday terms between June and August. That’s why it’s wise to revisit data from last year. It’ll probably reflect what’s going to happen this year a lot more accurately.

I know it’s tempting to wait until November; I tend to be a procrastinator myself. But hear me out this time. If you wait until the last possible second and rush through your planning, it’s unlikely you’ll see much of a return on your design investment, not to mention your valuable time, and you’ve heard the old adage: “Time is money.” This isn’t rocket science, people. But don’t you worry. If you start now you still have plenty of time to ensure that your holiday specials are well thought-out, marketed, ranked and profitable come holiday time. Here are some ideas to help you get the ball rolling on your holiday marketing plan:

What to do in September.
This is the month you should start writing up some good text for your upcoming holiday specials. This is the fun part! Get super creative. Perhaps even make a game of it. Have some of your wittiest friends over to help you come up with some fun titles. Once you’ve got this down, figure out what you want to promote during the holiday season. Come up with a few different choices for products and use your friends and family to help you. Ask them what they would buy if they were customers. After you make your final decision and are happy with it, get this info to your Webmaster—stat! Also, make sure that your supply chain can accommodate your specials so you can avoid not fulfilling time-sensitive orders during this crazy time. Nothing is more frustrating to holiday shoppers, and you want to keep these people happy if you want them to come back eventually.

…and in October.
Now is the time to start putting your holiday promotions up on your site in highly visible places, especially the homepage. If you don’t want to put your specials directly on your homepage, at least place links to them there, and be sure to use eye-catching graphics. (Think eye candy.) It’s important to make your specials visually stimulating so that you can entice your shoppers to buy. Fun and festive designs work well this time of year. Make sure that all pages featuring holiday specials are very well optimized. This is when proper use of headings, meta descriptions and heading tags becomes important. Also, don’t forget to incorporate those all-important keywords into your copy, and weave them in naturally to avoid appearing spammy.

Design e-mail marketing blasts to go out to every single person in your database. Hopefully you’ve been preparing ahead of time and already have a database which includes every online buyer you’ve had in the last few years, plus potential customers who are likely to be interested in what you have to offer. Basically anyone who you think wants to be exposed to your holiday specials should be included on this list.

Once you’ve taken the time to write up a good blast, go ahead and post it on your site. If you have a newsroom or blog, post it there. Then advertise it on other blogs linking back to your promo page. Also, add the link to your e-mail signature so that everyone you e-mail can see it. Once you’ve got the blast up on your site, optimize the new content and get the search engines looking into what’s going on ahead of time. If you do this early enough in October, these pages should be indexed and ranking by Hanukkah.

Now you’re ready to send out the first e-mail blast. You probably won’t get a lot of buyers early on, but that’s perfectly ok. The purpose of this e-mail campaign is to plant the seed. Next you should write three more e-mail marketing blasts to capitalize on the early bird shoppers of early November, the Thanksgiving week and Black Friday shoppers, and the procrastinators who wait until the last possible week to start shopping. Business will probably be picking up in a month or so, and you don’t want to worry about constructing e-mails then. For a worry-free November, have them saved and ready to go.

Gobble, gobble! Here’s your November plan.
If you’ve followed this plan meticulously, now is the time to start reaping all the benefits of the past few months’ hard work. (Hooray!) In the beginning of the month you should send out the next e-mail blast, targeted to those early bird shoppers. In the middle of the month send out the one written for Thanksgiving week. Hopefully you have a great e-mail marketing team who can do this for you. If you have these written and ready to go, you can give your team instructions on when they should be sent out so that you don’t even have to worry about it.

Go check out some social networking sites, like MySpace or Facebook. Find out where people are talking about holiday and online shopping and then let those people know you’ve got holiday specials and packages. Links from these sites certainly can’t hurt.

Oh my goodness, December already!
Now for the home stretch. This is the time to send out your final e-mail blast. Take advantage of last-minute shoppers by offering them “one-click” shopping from the homepage. You should feature a description of your holiday special and provide a link to “buy it now.” Make sure the link leads directly to the credit card form. Instant sales! You can even offer up packaged deals or free gift wrapping. Also, many procrastinators love the phrase “free shipping”, so try wrapping some of the shipping cost into the product price. This creates the illusion of an awesome discount— icing on the cake of the “package deal” you’re already offering them.

So the lesson of this article is to plan ahead. Make sure and get lots of relevant content up on your site, and be sure to do it nice and early. This time of year is extremely competitive, but if you have a good strategy in place that makes execution easy when you’re crazy-busy, the holidays won’t seem so hectic. So take heed of my advice and get on board with those early holiday revelers. If done right your season should be merry and stress-free. Happy holidays!