SEO is one of the few industries that has not been affected by the current recession. In fact, over the past year, the SEO industry has actually seen a jump in needs and, therefore, hires. Part of this is due to brick-and-mortar retailers taking an online route and wanting better optimized websites. With Christmas just around the corner, this has meant that many retailers want their sites optimized for better holiday business. As a result, the Christmas season has seen a proportional jump in the need for SEO involving online retailers.

If you’re such a retailer and you want to incorporate SEO to increase your Christmas sales, you should have started back in October, if not earlier. Mentioned many times on this blog, results aren’t instant, especially considering Google. If getting to the top of Google for such terms as “Christmas toys” or “Christmas gift baskets” is important, an SEO campaign including content and links should have been completed by October or earlier. This way, the search engines have enough time to pick up the new results and incorporate them into their search. Whether this is on Google or Yahoo (the shopping search engine, essentially), getting results always takes time – Christmas season or any other point during the year.

But if you’re adding SEO like many do last-minute Christmas shopping, what might be more helpful in drawing in traffic is SEM, such as blog and twitter posts and article marketing. By using an SEO company to do such a campaign, coupled with standard SEO, having such links on blogs and in article marketing will draw visitors to your website. A proper SEO campaign followed by SEM is often the most helpful, as the links from blogs or article marketing and new SEO content and links boost a website up quicker. Although these results don’t last (and several SEM campaigns may need to be done to keep a website up), the results from SEO do, while such SEM practices like blog and article marketing one-way links give a website a quick boost in rank and traffic.