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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.

Valentine’s Day is one of 2010’s first large shopping day and should hopefully be a great boom for online e-commerce websites trying to promote their Valentine’s Day gift products.

Lovers will, as always, be celebrating their love and buying one another romantic gifts from a variety of places, hoping to once again win another part of their significant other’s heart.

In turns out that, according to a research company who has performed several survey’s leading up to this year’s Valentine’s day, the average consumer will spend approximately 103 USD (66.01 GBP) on tranditional Valentine’s gifts this year. This includes greetings cards, day’s out, flowers, jewelry and of course Valentine’s day chocolate. This is apparently, an increase of only 0.50 USD (0.32 GBP) from last year.

Strangely, although the increase in overall spending on Valentine’s day has not increased substantially, more and more lovers will be purchasing their Valentine’s day gifts online at various e-commerce websites. According the the Head of Research at Shop.org, online e-commerce shoppers are anticipated to spend approximately 68.81 USD (44.10 GBP) more than those shopping offline. That’s 171.81 USD (110.11 GBP) from potential e-commerce shoppers this Valentine’s day, rather than the lower 103 USD (66.01 GBP) expected from offline Valentine’s gift shoppers.

“o-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose, and donn’d his clothes,
And dupp’d the chamber-door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.”

– William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 5

If you’d like to discuss how you’re e-commerce website will deal with and make the most of Valentine’s day, or  any other large national holiday, please feel free to contact us.

However, if you want some more general e-commerce information, or are thinking about setting up a new e-commerce website, we have some great e-commerce related information on our dedicated e-commerce information pages.

In an update to our previous post on Google Buzz, we now have a screenshot to show of the Google Buzz interface within Gmail. The following screenshot shows the Google Buzz Welcome screen, as shown the first time you access Google Buzz.

Google Buzz welcome screen

Google has tried social networking in the past, with ventures such as Orkut and Google Friend Connect, however neither have really become very popular. In fact, I imagine many of you reading this article may not have heard of Orkut at all. Google Friend Connect on the other hand is a API for web developers to put Google hosted social networking features directly into their websites via a iframes, JavaScript and AJAX.

Anyway, I’m here to talk about Google Buzz, which is a new social network that Google are releasing to all Gmail users. It combines elements of Twitter and Facebook and is integrated directly into the user interface of Gmail. Google started the launch of Google Buzz to a small selection of Gmail users yesterday (9th February 2010) and is continuing to release Google Buzz to more and more people over the next few days.

Take a look at this Google Buzz demonstration video. It is obvious from Google Buzz, that many elements of the service are inspired heavily by existing microblogging and social networking services, such as Facebook, Twitter and identi.ca.

Google Buzz on Google Apps?

Google has stated that Google Buzz is not yet available for users of Google Apps for Domains yet, but it is being worked on. Based on this, it can be anticipated that Google Buzz for Google Apps will probably be released within a couple of weeks, towards to end of the Google Buzz launch for regular Gmail users.

Google Buzz and Search Engine Optimisation

I may be discussing Google Buzz more as this service develops and is released to more and more users. As Google Buzz listing will appear alongside Twitter results in Google search engine results pages (SERPs), Google Buzz may also create a buzz in the search engine optimisation community.

If you’re interested in search engine optimisation for your website from a team who really know what they’re doing, take at look some of the search engine optimisation work we do and see examples on our live SEO results page. If you just want some more about this intriguing new product from Google, take a look at the official Google Buzz pages.

Facebook, one of the largest and most well known PHP powered social networking websites has made significant changes to its web design. Facebook have taken a more minimalistic web design approach in many respects, removing most of the bottom application and instant messaging bar, and moving to a left hand side bar. From a technical perspective, Facebook have increased their use of many web technologies such as JavaScript and AJAX in an effort to increase the speed of website loading and make improve the overall user experience. This certainly increases speed but can cause issues on intermittent or unreliable Internet connections, or on browsers with no or poor JavaScript support. However, Facebook has full support for Internet Explorer 7, 8, Firefox 3, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera.

The left sidebar of the new web design now features links to the news feed, friends, messages, friends and Facebook applications. These applications include both built-in Facebook applications such as Photos and custom made applications such as Rapid Wish List (in the Facebook screenshot above). The sidebar also includes direct links to the top online friends in your Facebook instant messaging, providing you are signed into Facebook’s chat system, which is not the case in the screenshot shown above.

Hopefully you enjoy the new web design Facebook has adopted, but as always there are many Facebook groups which heavily dislike the new changes to the Facebook web design. This is always the case with Facebook design changes it seems. What do you think? Do you like the changes or find that they make the website more difficult to use?

If you’re interested in a new web design for your website, whether minimalist like Facebook’s new design, or much bigger and bolder, please feel free to contact us. We do web design, web development, the creation of dynamic PHP-powered web applications and search engine optimisation and much more. Take a look at some of our other work.