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So, what is your business going to be doing this Valentine’s day?

With all hope, business will be booming as you stock many relevant red and pink Valentine’s day gifts. The problem is, in e-commerce, it is fine to stock plenty of unique and holiday specific gifts, but if you’re not getting any hits to your website, you’ll be low on leads and even lower on conversions. You need to get seasonal visitors to your e-commerce website, and that means doing seasonal e-commerce related keyword research.

Unfortunately, people have already been all over the standard keywords and phrases you expect for these holiday. So ‘Valentine’s Day’, ‘Valentine’s Day gifts’ and ‘Valentine’s Day presents’ are all highly competitive  keywords, so you’ll need to try alternatives. A good idea here is localised keywords and phrases. If you are running both a retail store and an e-commerce website, you may wish to target localised keywords such as:

• ‘Valentine’s Day gifts Stafford’
• ‘Valentine’s Day presents Stafford’
• ‘Valentine’s Day Stafford’

Seasonal holidays are also a good time for some highly relevant link building. There are many seasonal holiday specific product listing and directory websites, that are designed to help people find gifts and presents for Valentine’s day and other holidays from a variety of different merchants. If you’re lucky, and the directory website is set-up appropriately, you may be able to set up a merchant account with the website and promote your products and gifts in-line on the website.

Whether it is Valentine’s day and love is in the air, or Christmas time with high festive spirits, your e-commerce site can always benefit, especially through link building and natural search engine traffic and rankings though search engine optimisation. Here at Rapid Web, we specialise in getting natural traffic to your websites via advanced search engine optimisation techniques.

Interested in how this holiday can help your e-commerce website? Feel free to contact us and have a chat. If you want, we have collated some consumer statistics for Valentine’s Day 2010 we’re happy to share.

Why is Google naming the latest development version of their search algorithms after the main component of my morning beverage? And more importantly, will the new ‘Caffeine’ algorithms really put the ever expanding Bing in the shade more than it already is?

Earlier this week, Google let slip the development of the ‘Caffeine’ algorithms. The new algorithms are designed to ensure new and fresh content (in terms of time-sensitive news and articles) appear at the top of search engines meaning it will soon become even more important that websites keep their content up-to-date where appropriate. Although these changes will have a significant issue for search engine optimisers, many end-users of Google may not notice the difference as Google’s current web interface is not going anywhere, and thus for many, these changes will go unnoticed apart from perhaps the odd more relevant search result.

Bing – Microsoft’s search engine – is soon to become the search engine which powers Yahoo search, and will likely become Google’s only major competitor in both the UK and US search markets. This will make for some ne and interesting challenges for SEO optimising for the new Google and Bing algorithms. However, removing the Yahoo algorithms from the search engine optimisation equation entirely will certainly benefit many websites that already rank well in Google and Bing, or indeed Live Search from which Bing inherited its index and many of its initial search algorithms.

For more information on search engine optimisation in general please see our dedicated SEO services page, or to see how we are doing in ever advanced optimisations see our Live SEO Rankings page which automatically updates to show the latest results for a small selection of our clients’ targeted keywords and their positions in Google, Bing/Live and Yahoo.

Any other questions? Feel free to comment just below or contact us directly.