Top 9 Ways to Optimize for the Upcoming Holiday Shopping Season!

• The holiday shopping season is almost here and I want to get a jump on optimizing and positioning my site online more effectively in advance of the shopping rush. Can you give me some tips to better optimize my site and campaigns for the coming holidays?

Answer: According to the National Retail Foundation the 2016 holiday shopping season looks to be a rosy one for retailers! Total holiday sales are projected to increase a solid 3.6 percent to $655.8 billion. That's significantly higher than the ten-year average increase of just 2.5 percent.

Thanks to dropping gas prices and unseasonably warm temperatures, the upcoming holiday shopping season should reflect an improved economic climate. That means more money for shoppers to spend on themselves and family. Online and mail-order shopping in particular is projected to rise by a significant 8.5 to 9 percent. That's not pocket change for the average retailer.

To that end, preparing your site's pages for the holiday rush could make all the difference in getting a healthy piece of this bigger pie. Here are nine simple, but often overlooked, tips that may dramatically improve your bottom line this shopping season:

Tip #1 - 301 Redirect your 2015 Product Pages

Do you have old 2015 product pages that you aren't using this holiday season? How about 2015 holiday promotion pages? It's very likely that those pages have incoming links or link juice just sitting there. Make those pages work for you by 301 redirecting them to related or similar products or promotions you are pushing this holiday season.

Next, make sure you brush-up on Google's best practices for handling out-of-stock items. Review their video on the i...