Web presence during the holiday season can be just as important for brick and mortar businesses as well as those whose only presence is online. There are many things that traditional businesses can do on their web sites to impact holiday sales.   Here are some ideas on how to use your website to promote and enhance the holiday season.

Use your website to advertise sales and promotions.  Everyone loves gift ideas and good deals.  Target holiday shoppers by letting them know about your new products and sale promotions.  Getting these in front of potential customers via the web can help motivate them and get them into your storefront.  From newsletters to ads, now is the time to incentivize buyers with a reason to shop with you as well as to choose your products and services over others.

Post online store and product reviews.  Posting online reviews of both products and your business is a good way for customers and potential customers to get information about you and the goods and services you sell.  You can incorporate this into your website by simply posting client feedback, adding product reviews and business testimonials on home and product pages. You can also post any awards or endorsements from professional organizations that your business has garnered.  Encourage satisfied visitors to ‘like you’ or a product on Facebook or pin one of your products on Pinterest.

Make doing business with you easy by listing store policies and services. Make sure that all information such as shipping charges, services, return policies, and guarantees are easily found.  Doing so will help current and potential customers feel more comfortable about doing business with your company.  Answering all your customers’ questions up front — often translates to more sales.

Be sure to post store hours and directions.  Post store hours and highlight holiday hours to facilitate customers’ busy seasonal schedules. Make your business easy to find with clear address and directions available on your site.  Include a Google map or other way to find directions easily.  Because many people will probably be using mobile phones and other devices, make sure this information is accessible on mobile devices.  You want to make it convenient for them to find and visit you.

If you are familiar withinternet marketing you will already know that getting back links is one of the most important aspects of a successful SEO campaign. Links have a great amount of influence on traffic to your website and can be important to your business’ success. These days with the increased importance of social media, it is important to add one more component to your link building and marketing efforts. This component is social bookmarking –  another way to increase links.

With social bookmarking you are creating bookmarks for web pages that users want to remember or share with other users.  These bookmarks are stored as links to the web pages in question and then saved on social networking sites. Depending on how the user saves the links, the links can be viewed by the public or shared only with a specific or targeted group of people. The links are added to the social networking site by including keyword tags, titles or URLs to the web pages.

The immediate benefit of social bookmarking your site is that you create a link pointing to your site. A lot of the social bookmarking websites have high authority, which means those websites are trusted by lots of people. The link from those sites is a big asset in increasing your SEO ranking.

Another obvious benefit of social bookmarking is that it can help you draw more visitors to your site. Assuming your site has interesting content, you can easily draw more traffic this way.  In fact, sometimes when somebody book marks a web site, what occasionally happens is a number of people suddenly rush to that particular website causing a surge or overload to the targeted site.

Unlike other forms of web link building, social bookmarks gain value with time and should therefore be included in as many social bookmarking sites as possible. Links that have been included in social networking sites tend to accumulate more tags over a longer period and therefore traffic to these particular sites increases as time passes. This is therefore a long term internet marketing tool.

The best way to take advantage of this internet marketing tool is to seek a professional in this area. Professional web marketing providers will know the most popular social bookmarking sites and will do the submission of bookmarks to the web sites on your behalf.  Combining social bookmarking with other web linking strategies will enhance the success of your website.

Local search of search engines can be very helpful to many businesses.  Studies have shown that a significant percentage of search engine queries are local searches that involve adding a geographic term, such as a town, city or zip code to a search engine search. By conducting a local search internet users can reduce the number of results that are brought up by an individual query.  This makes it easier to bring up more meaningful search results because only those businesses that are related to the search appear in the results. If you search “hardware stores” and “Brooklyn, New York” the search engine will bring up only hardware stores that are located in Brooklyn.   Results in local searches are even shown clustered on a map so the user can easily see which ones are located closest to them.

The map feature of a local search is important because people prefer to use the services of businesses that are near to them. Many people consider the location of the business before they ever read the ads or other provided information. With the local search feature this process is made simpler for the Internet user. The fact Google is showing more local results without someone entering a town in a search query only serves to drive that local SEO cannot be ignored.

For a local business of any size, local SEO starts with keyword research and identifying the terms your customers use to find you, including any geographical terms – these keywords can include “New York City hardware stores”.

Despite the increasing use of the local search function, many businesses are failing to use this feature to its fullest. In order to help your customers find you, you need to help them find you when they perform a Local Search. So, the first step you need to take is to perform a search of your business online with various search engines so you can find out whether or not your business actually turns up. If not, you need to take some steps to change this fact. If you don’t take steps to make a change, you may be missing out on hundreds of potential customers.