Your friendly neighborhood client support tech, Corey, here! With trick-or-treating, turkey, and gift-giving right around the corner, the holiday season is in the air. That also means that it's the time of year when everyone is at home on vacation with hours upon hours to sit down, surf the web, and do some holiday shopping.

If you want the potential influx of site visitors to enjoy their time on your site, there are a few things you will want to do to early enough to fully prepare your site for the holidays.

1. Make sure your content is up-to-date

The quickest way to get visitors to lose interest in your site is to not keep it updated. In a social network fueled world where people are accustomed to being able to find out the real-time score of a grade school kickball game that is happening on the other side of the planet at the click of the button, its more important than ever that you and your site remain current with the times. Its simply the culture that came bundled with the big technology boom of the 2000s. "If it's not new, it's lame."

If you run an eCommerce site, make sure you take some time before the holiday season comes around to go through the products listed on your website and make corrections and updates. Consider updating product descriptions, photos, and even prices. November and December are the biggest shopping months of the year, so be sure to score those additional sales by offering new and updated products.

2. Get your website search engine optimized

I could write an entire series of blog posts on just SEO (which may happen in the future,) but for the purposes of this holiday article, I'm going to focus on how you can take advantage of SEO in the holiday season.

With online shopping becoming a bigger and bigger outlet for gift buying every year, its becoming extremely common for a shopper to search for interesting gift ideas and browse various websites before making a final purchase. This is where using proper SEO practices can bring in important traffic to your store during the busiest shopping season of the year.

The simplest SEO update you can do before the shopping season starts is to see which keywords and content received the most visitors on your site over the past year. Find out what worked best for your site, use that formula to create or update content, and start steering customers in your direction.

If you plan on marketing products or promotions specifically for the holiday shopping season, one neat SEO trick is to create special landing pages for your products specifically designed for what your potential customers might be searching for. Use page titles like “Gift Ideas Under $100″ or “Great Christmas Ideas," include relevant keywords in your meta descriptions, and you'll have customers looking for last minute gift ideas driven to your site from simple Google searches.

3. Go mobile! Make your site responsive

With the news that a record 10 million new iPhones were sold just this past weekend alone, it should be fairly obvious that the number of people shopping on their phones is at a record high as well. If your website isn't mobile-ready, that is without a doubt something to strongly consider before the upcoming holidays.

Last year, Amazon.com announced that more than 50 percent of its customers shopped its website via mobile devices during the 2013 holiday season. If Amazon's website wasn't easily viewable on a phone, they would have lost half of their holiday revenue. If your website is hard to navigate on mobile devices, you are inadvertently causing yourself to lose out on a large portion of potential sales.

4. Maximize the user experience

The best thing you can do for your site is to improve the overall user experience. The easiest way to do this is to view your site as if you were a first time visitor. Set aside some time to sit down, open up your website, and browse it with a clean slate. As a first time site visitor, what aspects do you like and not like? If you weren't the owner, would you be inclined to return to the site a second and third time?

Perhaps the biggest determining factor in whether a user has a good experience on your site or not is site speed. Numerous studies have shown that a majority of internet users will leave a site if it hasn't loaded in under 4 seconds. Think about it...we live in a time where waiting for a 5-second advertisement to go away before we can watch a YouTube video is the end of the world. The internet is all about convenience. If your website isn't convenient to use, people won't use it. The most likely culprit of a slow site is the overuse of large images. If images aren't your problem, it's most often just poorly written code.

I hope you put these pre-holiday tips to good use! I'm sure I'll be publishing some more soon (I just do what I'm told around here.)

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