It’s that time of year again. My neighborhood is covered in cobwebs, spiders and there’s one quite disturbing house with psycho clowns.
It can only mean one thing: It’s Christmas time!
Yes, for the next few weeks our social media feeds will be full of people complaining about how Christmas decorations are up too soon and ruining the real reason for Christmas. And when Thanksgiving rolls around, we will see our Facebook feeds quickly switch to people complaining about how they don’t have enough time to get everything done especially since there is one less week between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year.
Yet for those marketing online, seasonal selling is year-round. Yes, year-round. This post can be viewed at any time, and Google can serve it up in the result set whenever it determines this is the most relevant post. Will that be if people search for Halloween and promotional products? Or perhaps when they search for psycho clowns and technology?
Or perhaps it will be when someone Googles “Dale Denham.” Hmmm. Here is an odd thought. What if someone Googles psycho clowns and Dale Denham? No doubt, this post would be No. 1 in the results. But since I bought the domain name www.daledenhamisapsychoclown.com and posted this article on that page, it surely will become the No. 1 result if you were to Google “Dale Denham Psycho Clown.”
But I digress, the point is, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is an ongoing activity, and the blog you post today will be available for years to come. But you can’t rest on your past activity too much; Google recognizes the value of relevancy, and the timing of your post is a big factor in determining relevancy. So in fact, my Merry Christmas post might do quite well for the next several weeks. And on the odd chance someone searches for psycho clowns and Christmas, I might do well there, too.
Some of you have noticed a few hyperlinks in my post. These too are very important to your SEM. If I want a specific result to appear when you type in “Geiger won’t quit working for you” I hyperlink the copy to the site I want it to go to (in this case, I could have titled it “Watch Dale Denham fall while dancing“).
There is much to learn about SEM that I can’t teach you, but many resources can. In the meantime, just remember that every time you blog or post on your social networks, you are posting something that might bring business for years to come.
P.S. A big Hanukkah shout-out to all my Jewish friends, especially you, Jason Lerner. I’m not ignoring Hanukkah, but I only can cover so much in one post. And besides, this is evidently the one and only time Hanukkah will ever coincide with Thanksgiving, and since it is so early, it wouldn’t have worked well for this post.
Geiger CIO Dale Denham, MAS+ provides practical insights on how you can benefit from technology in no nonsense terms. Follow him on Twitter @GeigerCIO.
