For the past three years my parents have asked me what I want for Christmas and the answer was always the same – SXSW Gold Badge, Gold Badge, Gold Badge. I was a student then and couldn’t afford it on my own, but now that I’m gainfully employed (bless you, Apogee) I can buy my own badge this year. Fun!

However, just because I don’t need presents doesn’t mean Christmas just goes away, so again my folks issued the call for gift ideas for their decidedly geeky/crafty/quasi-pinko-hipster daughter, and I had to think of something. Not only what my folks could give me, but also how to get them a list specific enough to where my choices were unmistakable.

Being a slave to social media, I made my list this year with Delicious. The social bookmarking site scraped the very title tags from Amazon, Target and the like, making each item’s title descriptive enough to where my parents could easily find what they were looking for among the options I offered – however, some of them needed a little doctoring. For example, My Ben Folds shirt didn’t have title tags at all and selected items from the Wilco store were merely labeled “WILCO: STORE,” whereas Amazon had keyword-rich title tags, making it easy for me to remember what I linked to, and creating an opportunity for links with optimized anchor text. As items from e-commerce websites get sent around the Internet during seasons of high volume gift-giving, optimized title tags are a great way to get correctly-optimized links from a variety of sources. So label those pages carefully for holly jolly traffic even in “bah, humbug” recessions.

Merry Christmas everyone!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 24th, 2008 at 11:57 am by Lauren Perdue and is filed under E-Commerce, Natural Search (SEO), Online Marketing, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.