Conventional wisdom dictates that, for a website to be properly optimised in time for Christmas, the work has to be put in from May onwards, as there can be a 6 month lead time before it bears any fruit. All very sensible and believable, but is it actually necessary to plan this far ahead?

Well, I’m certainly of the opinion that the more effort you put in, for the longer a period, the more successful you are going to be with SEO. However, it is certainly feasible to achieve decent Christmas-related rankings (if we can actually suggest there is such a thing as a universal “ranking” anymore) without having to start the ball rolling in the spring.

One of the methods for achieving these “instant rankings” is to try and get your fresh content recognised by Google. For instance, by writing a blog piece about a currently trending news item. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are 2 very obvious examples that jump to mind here – though obviously you’ll be competing with many other sites that are also trying to get some Google Love around the same topic.

Something slightly more “out of the box” might be to comment on the annual stories about terrible / amusing / naff Christmas cards that celebrities put out at this time of year. And, of course, there was the traditional “winter wonderland” disaster story a couple of weeks ago that could provide some food for a topical blog post.

In general, though, I’d suggest that the reality of when you need to start your Christmas optimisation process is at latest halfway between the conventional wisdom and the topical news version – ie around August-September time, giving you 3-4 months of traction.

A few things to bear in mind:

1) Christmas comes round every year. (Like, duh!). What this enables you to do for your website, of course, is to have a Christmas-related page / section that can be updated every year but will retain some historical value from having been around longer and hopefully built up a pile of inbound links each year.

2) Attracting Christmas themed links in August may not be especially easy, but is certainly not impossible with a bit of creativity. Ideas such as “Our Top Tips for Christmas Best Sellers” etc can be decent link bait even if your target market is still basking in the sun on its summer holiday.

3) Continue to add relevant content to your Christmas page/s and blog posts – utilising the internal linking capacity of your blog to point to your specific Christmas page/s, so that when the time comes round you’ll have plenty of ammunition with which to top those Christmas charts.

So if you can’t take advantage of topical news stories, make sure you plan ahead for next year – the earlier the better!