More holiday shoppers than ever will be hitting online stores this year. Is your website ready to meet their needs and generate as much revenue as possible during this key time of year?

Over 30 percent of online shoppers say they’ll make more of their holiday purchases over the Internet, citing convenience, easy price comparisons, and the ability to avoid crowds as their main reasons for increasing their online spending, according to a study by BIGresearch.

If your website isn’t already in shape for the holiday season, now is the time to give it a makeover. The local Internet marketing experts at Orange Soda offer the following tips for getting your website ready for the holidays:

* Offer free shipping – and let people know about it.

It’s still a tough economy, and shoppers will be looking for incentives to shop at your online store. If you fail to offer free shipping this holiday season, you might well be one of the few online stores that doesn’t; nearly 85 percent of online retailers say they will offer free shipping this holiday season, according to the BIGresearch study.

Get the word out by listing your free shipping offer on Freeshipping.org. They will include your logo on a list of websites that offer free shipping for a day on Dec. 17. Small businesses can benefit from the exposure by registering on the site. It’s cheaper than running an ad, and it can bring you new customers.

“Though last year’s participants included Macy’s, Kohl’s, Toys ‘R’ Us and other top retailers looking to leverage the traffic to Freeshippingday.com, some of the event’s greatest impact was on smaller retailers without the marketing budget to spread news of their holiday offers across the Web,” according to Freeshippingday.com.

* Run paid advertisements on search engines.

Called paid search advertising, these ads show up on search engines and are triggered by the words people type when they do a search online. They are a very efficient type of advertising based on an auction-type model. Anyone can run a campaign (such as advertising free shipping for the holidays), but it’s easy to lose money and is quite technical to run. To get the most for your money, it may make sense to choose a company like Orange Soda that provides pay per click management.

* Prepare an online gift guide.

Arrange popular holiday products by age, gender or price and link to your gift guide on your home page. Make sure to promote the guide in press releases and on social networking websites as part of your search engine marketing plan.

* Check that your shopping cart works and your website loads quickly.

If you build it and they come, make sure your website works. Your website should load quickly and the shopping cart should work without a glitch or people will click away. Also make sure your website is accessible by mobile phone.

More shoppers will be using their phones this holiday season, according to Internet Retailer. Customers are starting to compare prices when they’re standing in a store looking at the merchandise they want to buy. To capture their business, it’s important to make each activity on your site as streamlined and easy as possible for shoppers accessing your website from a mobile phone.

For more tips watch this video on optimizing for the holidays.