Quick and easy tips for the holiday rush

Monday, December 22, 2008

Season’s greetings, webmasters! We’ve compiled a list of quick and simple tips for websites
preparing for the holiday rush. For online and offline retailers, we understand that your website
is a big part of your business, especially this time of year. Whether it’s to make the sale online
or to increase foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar location, your web presence is a critical
part of your business plan. The tips below are fast and can make a big difference.

Verify that your site is indexed by Google (and is returned in search results)

Check your snippet content and page titles with the site: command
site:example.com—do they look accurate and descriptive for users? Ideally, each
title and snippet should be unique in order to reflect that each URL contains unique content. If
anything is missing or you want more details, you can also use the
Content Analysis tool
in Webmaster Tools. There you can see which URLs on your site show duplicate titles or meta
descriptions.

Label your images accurately

Don’t miss out on potential customers! Because good ‘alt’ text and descriptive filenames help us
better understand images, make sure you change non-descriptive file names 001.jpg to
something more accurate NintendoWii.jpg. Image Search is one of our largest search
properties, so you should
take advantage of it.

Know what Google knows (about your site)

Check for crawl errors and learn the top queries that bring traffic to your site through Webmaster
Tools. See our
diagnostics checklist.

Have a plan for expiring and temporary pages

Make sure to serve accurate
HTTP status codes.
If you no longer sell a product, serve a 404. If you have changed a product page to
a new URL, serve a 301 to redirect the old page to the new one. Keeping your site
up-to-date can help bring more targeted traffic your way.

Increase foot traffic too

If your website directs customers to a brick-and-mortar location, make sure you claim and double
check your business listing in
Google Local.

Usability 101

Test the usability of your checkout process with
various browsers. Ask yourself if a
user can get from product page to checkout without assistance. Is your checkout button easy to
find?

Tell us where to find all of your web pages

If you upload new products faster than Google crawls your site, make sure to submit a
Sitemap
and include ‘last modification’ and change frequency’ information. A Sitemap can point Googlebot
to your new or hard-to-find content.

Manage your sitelinks

Your site may be triggering
Sitelinks
in the search results, so check the links and make sure the destination pages are fully
functional. Remember: in Webmaster Tools you can remove any sitelinks that you don’t think users
will find useful.

Don’t forget to check out these additional resources

• Read our recently released
  SEO Starter Guide.
• Watch our
  Tutorials for Webmasters.
• Find out what information Google has about your website in
  Webmaster Tools.
• Get your other questions answered in our
  Webmaster Help Center.
• Ask your last-minute questions in the
  Webmaster Help Forum.
• Countdown to 2009!

Written by Matt Dougherty, Search Quality Team