2007-11-08T17:15:09-07:00 Practical Ecommerce info@practicalecommerce.com http://www.practicalecommerce.com/ Copyright 2007 Confluence Publishing DBA Practical Ecommerce http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/576/Video-SEO-Update 2007-11-08T17:15:09-07:00

In February 2006, Contributor Stephan Spencer, founder and CEO of search-firm Netconcepts, critiqued the search engine optimization efforts of Discountflies.com, following a request from that company. In this SEO Report Card critique, Spencer issued a C- for an overall SEO grade. In September 2007, Spencer revisited the SEO progress of Discountflies.com, and reports his findings in the video tutorial below. This video tutorial requires Flash Player version 8 or above. Please forward us your ideas for additional video tutorials, via our Contact Us form. Click the image below to launch the tutorial.

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/577/Video--SEO-Website-Update 2007-10-29T12:18:31-07:00

In January 2006, Contributor Stephan Spencer, founder and CEO of search-firm Netconcepts, critiqued the search engine optimization efforts of Balancedlifeproducts.com, following a request from that company. In this "SEO Report Card" critique, Spencer issued a D+ for an overall SEO grade. In September 2007, Spencer revisited the SEO progress of Balancedlifeproducts.com, and reports his findings in the video tutorial below. Click the image below to launch the tutorial. This video tutorial requires Flash Player version 8 or above. Please forward us your ideas for additional video tutorials, via our Contact Us form.

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/562/SEO-Report-Card-Beachaudiocom 2007-09-12T09:04:18-07:00

Ranked 359 in the Internet Retailer 500, and boasting over 45,000 products in its catalog and 151,000 pages in Google, Beach Audio has a lot of grunt. According to Troy McKinnon, their director of ecommerce, Beach Audio did a complete search engine optimization overhaul using in-house staff in April, and ever since, the search-generated sales have been rising steadily. Currently, organic search from Google accounts for about 10 percent of website sales, and the outlook continues to look good, especially with the holidays and their peak season right around the corner. Nonetheless, I see a lot of unrealized potential here. So let's dig in . . . First, let's cover some of what Beach Audio has done right and it's a number of things. They optimized their URLs to look static and to contain keywords and hyphens. They augmented their online catalog content with consumer reviews (using the PowerReviews service) in a way that the spiders like, rather than employing JavaScript the standard...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/558/Search-Engine-Optimization-And-Web-20 2007-09-06T09:03:07-07:00

That well-used buzzword "Web 2.0" encompasses a number of technologies, including blogs, RSS feeds, wikis, tagging/folksonomies, podcasts, widgets, AJAX and Flash. Some of these technologies are a net positive for your search engine visibility and some are a net negative.
 Blogs and RSS feeds are great for search engine optimization, for reasons I discussed in my previous articles "SEO: Blogging Your Way to the Top" and "SEO: RSS Feeds Increase Visibility." So are wikis, being they are text-rich, frequently updated and heavily linked internally. Furthermore, a wiki acts as "link bait," probably because it is viewed as a more definitive, neutral and trusted source where consensus has been reached. For example, by launching my SEO Glossary as a wiki I am certain that the site has garnered more links than it would have as a traditional website. Tagging is one of my favorite Web 2.0 technologies. Found primarily on blogs (particularly on WordPress blogs that utilize the free...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/554/SEO-Heads-or-Long-Tails 2007-08-29T09:55:52-07:00

Search engine optimizing for the "Long Tail" is fundamentally different from optimizing for the head. Therefore, it’s important to initially point out that the strategies and tactics for “Long Tail” SEO are more automated and extensible than for traditional SEO. For those unfamiliar with the concept of the “Long Tail,” it refers to the extremely long right-hand portion of the distribution graph, usually of an online retailer's product inventory. The term was coined by the Executive Editor of Wired Magazine, Chris Anderson. In comparison, the head occupies very little of the X-axis but is full of the “top hits” and best sellers. Put another way, the head represents the “vital few” and the tail represents the "trivial many." Anderson argued that the tail could actually add up to as much business as the head for an online retailer with unlimited virtual shelf space and therefore seemingly infinite selection, as is the case for Amazon.com and Netflix. There are...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/542/SEO-Report-Card-VeganStorecom 2007-08-15T16:42:52-07:00

VeganStore.com, operated by Pangea Vegan Products, is a site after my own heart. As a recently turned vegetarian (as of a year ago), I'm definitely in the target market. Too bad it's unlikely I would have discovered the site. That's because I'm not strictly vegan, and the site isn't targeting "vegetarian" as a keyword. The only occurrence of "vegetarian" on the home page is in the meta keywords — and meta keywords don't affect rankings (at least not positively!). Regardless, I doubt I'd come across the site in my searches — even if I were a vegan. The site doesn't appear on page 1 in Google for the most popular vegan-related keywords (according to Google Suggest) like "vegan," "vegan recipes," "vegan diet," "vegan shoes," "veganism" and "vegan food." It does rank No. 1 for "vegan products" and No. 3 for "vegan body care," but those keywords just aren't popular. The problem begins at their home page, where the only body copy (excluding link text) is the keyword-less...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/533/SEO-Report-Card-RepublicaTradingcom 2007-08-06T08:23:22-07:00

Founder Rafael Jimenez of NYC-based Latino and multi-ethnic men's streetwear brand Republica Trading Co. volunteered to have his site reviewed. That was a good call, because the site misses the mark when it comes to SEO in some key areas. Before even loading the home page, I uncovered a problem in the form of a 302 redirect. Running a server header check (using a tool like the one at http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/tools/server-header.php), I found a request for http://www.republicatrading.com is responded to with a 302 (temporary style) redirect to http://www.republicatrading.com/dev/index.php. That should have been a 301, or not redirected at all. The "Store Front" page lacked content, and included a huge image and an "Enter" button. (I thought we were past this stage in the evolution of website design?) The bottom line is this: no content equals nothing for the search engines to sink their teeth into. The product pages were indexed in Google despite the...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/531/SEO-Is-Your-Site-Holiday-ready 2007-08-01T11:55:10-07:00

Those of you with school-age children may have been preoccupied with back-to-school, but now it’s time to start preparing your site for the holidays. The holiday shopping season is not that far off, so get on with implementing these traffic-building tips in order to achieve maximum search engine visibility. 1. Build Your Links By acquiring a handful of links from high PageRank-endowed relevant sites, you will automatically enhance your site’s worthiness in the eyes of the search engines. (PageRank is, on a logarithmic scale of 0 to 10, Google’s importance score.) In my experience, a single link from a PageRank 8 homepage has significantly boosted rankings within several weeks. It's also worthwhile giving attention to existing inbound links where the anchor text is less than ideal (e.g. "click here" or "visit site"). If you can influence the text used in links by bloggers and business partners alike, you will profit in terms of additional rankings and traffic. Don’t forget...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/506/SEO-Metrics-That-Matter 2007-06-17T10:10:55-07:00

Out with the old, in with the new. In terms of SEO, what’s falling by the wayside? Obsessively watching indexation numbers and rankings on “trophy” keywords (like the one you know the CEO always checks first thing in the morning).Worrying yourself sick over “duplicate content penalties.” Relying on Sitemap XML files to fix your indexation problems (News flash: Your rankings will still stink!).Exchanging links. What’s hot in SEO? Truly understanding and leveraging the power of “long tail” dynamics.Becoming a trusted contributor within Wikipedia, Digg, StumbleUpon, Netscape and Reddit. Building your network in MySpace, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube, Bebo, MyBlogRoll and the blogosphere in general, and then reaping the rewards of “network effects.” Building custom search engines and rallying your community to help improve it.Link baiting. So how do you measure the impact of this sort of stuff? A new generation of SEO metrics, that's how. Gauging your success on...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/501/SEO-Report-Card-Change-Home-Page-Links 2007-06-12T16:45:16-07:00

This month's selectee, Millcraftfurniture.com, is an outdoor furniture manufacturer operating a small (less than 100 pages) MIVA Merchant-powered ecommerce site. Its rankings are in the doldrums. The store does not appear in the first 100 listings in Google for critical terms "Adirondack chairs" and "Adirondack chair." This site is buried deep in Google's results for many other key terms, such as "outdoor furniture," "patio furniture," "garden furniture," "porch swing" and "bench swing." Millcraftfurniture.com does rank No. 2 for both "poly furniture" and "poly outdoor furniture," but these two terms get little to no search activity, according to Yahoo! (specifically, the Overture Keyword Selector tool at Inventory.overture.com). Considering its home page PageRank is only a three out of 10 (on a logarithmic scale), and many of its product and category pages fare worse in terms of the PageRank importance, it's not surprising the site's rankings are so poor. Because this is such a...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/493/Critique-Part-Three-Search-Engine-Optimization 2007-06-04T08:19:31-07:00

The Problem: Long, complex URLs create search engine indexing issues. The Fix: Rewrite the URLs to eliminate "stop characters" from the URLs. You might wonder, "why bother?" when the dynamic pages are clearly getting indexed. Even so, studies undertaken by my company, Netconcepts, show that sites with dynamic URLs suffer greater PageRank leakage. Since the site is running IIS Server, I'd recommend using the ISAPI_Rewrite plugin. The goal is to change a URL like: http://www.daddiesboardshop.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWCATS&Category=207 to something like: https://www.daddiesboardshop.com/category/207.htm Here's the directive for httpd.ini to do this magic: [ISAPI_Rewrite] RewriteRule ^/category/([0-9]+)\.htm$ /index.asp?PageAction=VIEWCATS&Category=$1 [L] Replace links to the old-style category URLs with the new style. Repeat this approach for the product and manufacturer-page URLs. The Problem: Search engine spiders can't operate pull-down menus. The Fix: Change...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/480/SEO-Report-Card--Error-Pages-Create-Big-Issues 2007-05-14T14:40:17-07:00

Modernmini sells modern-style babies' and children's furniture, toys, bedding and more. Its site is powered by the Zoovy platform. Founder Pazit Kagel, a designer and mother of three, requested a site grade, and I'm happy to oblige. 1. The URLs contain session IDs — a no-no for SEO — but upon review of the cached version of the home page, I was relieved to find the session IDs are not being assigned to Googlebot. It appears there is "bot detection" happening behind the scenes, so when a spider like Googlebot is detected, session IDs are removed from the URLs in the links. I double-checked and none of the session ID-containing URLs have made it into Google's index. The session ID notwithstanding, the "product" and "category" URLs are relatively friendly to search engines. However, the product URLs do not contain keywords; they are product number-based. Ideally, the URLs should include keywords. 2. The "shop by product" and "shop by department" nav buttons are set up as...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/475/SEO-Link-Baiting-Tips-To-Juice-Your-Site 2007-05-07T12:26:07-07:00

Link bait, simply put, is content that is so funny, so interesting, so useful, or otherwise remarkable that it becomes irresistible to bloggers and website owners, who set up links from their pages to the original material. I've seen link bait take the form of Top 10 lists, humorous videos uploaded to YouTube, checklists, cartoons, tools, widgets and blog plugins — to name just a few. You might wonder if elements of your ecommerce site could become worthy link bait. I hate to break this to you — but probably not. Link bait is the sort of thing that tends to spread virally through email and the blogosphere. When was the last time you saw swarms of people forwarding emails about an ecommerce site? Not recently, I'd imagine. It's more realistic and fruitful to think of link bait as content that stands alongside your ecommerce site — either as a separate page, a blog post or a microsite. If you post the link bait to your ecommerce site, you should do so with the expectation...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/473/SEO-Report-Card-Need-Pages-At-Product-Level 2007-05-02T08:54:52-07:00

One site review request really stood out in this month's batch. Kyle Kano is the owner and operator of The Honey Jar, and he is just 17 years old. Kyle got the idea for his online business when, on a family trip to Colorado, he noticed a shop selling Honeyville Honey — a product made locally in his hometown. Hats off to Kyle for showing such initiative. Now let's have a look at his creation. One of the bigger opportunities I see here is the fact that there are no product pages. Category pages show a collection of products, each with a several-sentence description. Unfortunately, none of these product names clicks through to a product description page containing a product-focused title tag, H1 tag and page copy (including ingredients, food that the product complements, relevant recipes, etc.). For example, it is unlikely The Honey Jar will rank for "apricot whipped honey" because that product does not have a page dedicated to it. It's only mentioned on the "Whipped"...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/462/SEO-Google-Cracks-Open-Its-Black-Box 2007-04-16T10:40:28-07:00

Wouldn't it be great if Google offered insight into how your website stacks up against its super-secret algorithms? What ails your site when it comes to SEO and what could be done better? Google Webmaster Central (Google.com/webmasters) does just that, by offering a plethora of diagnostic and statistical tools, advice, answers and peer support to SEOs and webmasters. Webmaster Central began its life as Google Sitemaps, a protocol for submitting a list of your URLs to Google. With it you can let Googlebot know how you want your site crawled. Sitemaps still exists; but the breadth of services expanded so much that it warranted Google changing the name of its webmaster resource area to Webmaster Central last August. What are some of those services? In a recent interview, Vanessa Fox, product manager at Google Webmaster Central, offered some detail about those tools and resources (interview audio available at Marketingspeak.com/audio/vanessa-fox-interview.mp3). First, at...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/453/SEO-Report-Card-The-Google-Death-Sentence 2007-04-04T12:00:08-07:00

Seasonal online businesses, like Gifts By Delivery, have it tough. During most of the year, they live lean while sales slow to a trickle. Then autumn comes and the manna begins to rain down from heaven. For Gifts By Delivery, the ramp-up begins in early October. The fourth quarter last year brought in 65 percent of the company's annual revenue. It makes the most of this time, doing everything it can to maximize sales with advertising and marketing. That's because Gifts By Delivery knows the inevitable dip and flattening of the revenue line is right around the corner, in the New Year. Competing for organic search visibility during the holiday shopping season requires a ramp-up in online marketing — namely, link building and link baiting — many months in advance. It should start now, in fact. Giftsbydelivery.com's main SEO weakness lies in its links. A lack of link importance really holds the site back. The site's home page PageRank score is only four and as you click...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/444/SEO-The-Duplicate-Content-Penalty 2007-03-20T21:10:13-07:00

The question of Google's supposed "duplicate content penalty" seems to be on everybody's minds these days. This issue is particularly relevant for dynamic ecommerce websites, as they often have multiple URLs that lead to the same product content (or nearly the same, with only a variation in the product's color or size). Several factors magnify the problem of duplicate content. The fact that manufacturers give all their distributors the same product descriptions means those identical phrases end up on numerous sites including your own. Then there are the "scrapers" that run rampant across the web, lifting your content to use on their spam sites. How to foil the scrapers is a big topic that will need to be addressed in a future column. There has been a lot of talk — misinformation, really — about the "duplicate content penalty" from Google. It's a myth; it doesn't exist. You're hearing it straight from the horse's (Google's) mouth: Here, here and here. I have it from...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/421/SEO-Report-Card-Escaping-the-Google-Sandbox 2007-02-19T12:43:52-07:00

New sites are always at a disadvantage when it comes to ranking well in Google, particularly when the domain name is new, too. This phenomenon, known by some as the "Google Sandbox" and by others as the "TrustBox," is not a myth. It is very real and very much an issue for the subject of this issue's SEO Report Card — the fair trade supporting merchant "Two Hands Worldshop." Two Hands registered its domain in September 2006 and launched the site in November based on a customized installation of osCommerce. In December it reached out to SEO forums asking for advice. Some of the advice was good and was taken on board, such as switching from dynamic URLs to static (i.e. no ? & = characters), and addressing its duplicate site issues (both www.twohandsworldshop.com and twohandsworldshop.com were getting indexed). That I was happy to see, although the latter should have been solved using 301 redirects rather than BASE HREF tags. Some of the advice given I didn't agree with, such as...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/413/SEO-Can-Wikipedia-Help-Your-Business 2007-02-12T09:33:58-07:00

In Google, Wikipedia is everywhere. Pretty much anything you type into Google seems to result in a Wikipedia entry being returned as a top-10 result. Wikipedia's status in the search engines as an "authority site" is undisputed. Those lucky, well-connected, skillful or famous enough to be cited enjoyed the benefits of Wikipedia's unique "golden link effect." Then a new policy instituted in January changed all that. As a countermeasure to thwart spammers competing in an SEO contest, all external links within Wikipedia were "nofollowed." This effectively cut off the outward flow of "link juice" (PageRank) to websites referenced in Wikipedia. Despite this setback, Wikipedia remains an important component to your SEO strategy. Firstly, having a Wikipedia entry for your company that shows up in the search results lends credibility to your organization. Secondly, if high rankings for a competitive keyword prove elusive, you can get Wikipedia into the top 10 with relative ease. Of...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/384/SEO-To-Buy-Links-or-Not-to-Buy-Links 2007-01-10T09:02:38-07:00

If Google engineer Matt Cutts had his druthers, buying links would become an extinct SEO practice. Cutts has addressed the topic of link-buying on a number of occasions on his blog (Mattcutts.com/blog) and in blog comments elsewhere. He's admonished webmasters who buy links for PageRank and encouraged webmasters instead to buy only links that have been "nofollowed" — in other words, where the rel=nofollow attribute has been added to the link so that the search engines do not count that link as a vote. He has stated in no uncertain terms that Google considers "buying text links for PageRank purposes to be outside our quality guidelines." Cutts outed the Berkeley college newspaper (Dailycal.org) on his blog as a link seller. Cutts then warned that sites such as Dailycal.org that sell links may "lose their ability to give reputation." In other words, Google may revoke the site's voting power — its ability to pass PageRank. That is of course disastrous for the link...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/382/SEO-Report-Card-Freshpaircom 2007-01-02T09:41:31-07:00

This month marks the one-year anniversary of the SEO Report Card. During this time, I have received many kind words from both readers and report card recipients — words of gratitude and encouragement — for which I am grateful. I hope to render even more assistance in 2007. Now that you know Google's tough stance on text-link-buying, the unwelcome scrutiny from Googlers who might be reading this article probably wouldn't be what our eager volunteers had in mind when they put their name in the hat for a review. Therefore, I'm going to pick another site, one that has not solicited my help. In Googler Matt Cutts' classic blog post "Tell Me About Your Backlinks," (Mattcutts.com/blog/tell-me-about-your-backlinks/) Matt regales his readers with his analysis of websites of brave attendees during Q&A at his session at PubCon and their dubiously "earned" links. He alluded to the powerful tools he has at his disposal when logged into the Google VPN (Virtual Private Network). Given...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/371/SEO-Report-Card-Scrappopotamuscom 2006-12-01T00:01:07-07:00

It is time for another MIVA Merchant-powered ecommerce site to get picked apart. I will try to be gentle. This month's "selectee" has the coolest name - Scrappopotamus. It is a pretty nice-looking website as far as ecommerce sites go, but with an Alexa rank of 1,338,118 (i.e., the 1,338,118th most popular site on the Internet), that design is wasted on a paltry few visitors. As you'll soon see, there is much they can do to improve the site's SEO. Scrappopotamus.com Report Card Home Page Content: B- Inbound Links and PageRank: C Indexation: D Internal Hierarchical Linking Structure: C HTML Templates and CSS: C- Secondary Page Content: C Product Page Content: C- Keyword Choices: B- Title Tags: C URLs: D OVERALL GPA: C- 1. The category links in the left navigation only appear on internal pages, but not on the most important page of the site - the home page.Worse yet, these left nav links (as well as all the top nav links) are images, not text. That's a shame since...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/368/SEO-Toolkit 2006-12-01T00:01:04-07:00

If you consider that search engine optimization (SEO) is a scientific discipline, then you'll agree that obtaining empirical measurements using a comprehensive suite of tools is an absolute must. Every day should be filled with experimentation, data collection and more experimentation. Flying blind is not an option. So, let's not waste any time. There is a plethora of data to be mined and insights to be gleaned. Here I share with you some, but by no means all, of my favorite free (unless otherwise noted) SEO tools. Note that in order to minimize redundancy, I have excluded those tools which I had previously covered in my "Tools For Link Building" article (April 2006 issue). For Keyword Research: WordTracker.com - A paid tool. Data is based on the Metacrawler search engine. KeywordDiscovery.com - A paid tool. Data is based on the number of search engines. Overture Keyword Selector (inventory.overture.com) - Based on Yahoo! searches. Verb tenses, misspellings,...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/335/SEO-Report-Card-Coolbugstuffcom 2006-11-01T14:43:00-07:00

This month I’ve chosen a fun, quirky ecommerce site about insects. Seth Prezant, founder and “bugmaster” (gotta love that title) at Cool Bug, LLC, explains he had an outside company assemble the website for him, and it has been in operation for almost five months. Unfortunately, the site gets effectively no traffic—an average of 37.5 visitors per day. Seth admits, “I am nowhere to be found on Google, but I seem to get most customers through MSN.” So let’s help Prezant supercharge his website traffic. After all, there’s only one place to go, and that’s up. A necessary prerequisite to good rankings in Google is getting indexed. However, www.coolbugstuff.com’s indexation is quite minimal, a mere 59 pages, with all but a few in Google’s dreaded “Supplemental Index.” There are several reasons why they are not indexed well. One is that their link popularity and importance score (PageRank) are so low—a PageRank of 0 for the home page. Google isn’t reporting...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/334/SEO-Choosing-a-Vendor 2006-11-01T13:34:00-07:00

Selecting an SEO vendor to help improve your site’s searchengine visibility is fraught with hidden dangers.What if the vendor uses unscrupulous tactics without your knowledge, and you get penalized? What if they make promises that they can’t possibly keep? What if they just aren’t very good at SEO? If you’re not a seasoned SEO veteran, it’s easy to get snookered or to simply make a wrong choice. Don’t fret; the tips that follow should steer you in the right direction. Look for the Positive The vendor’s link popularity and its home page’s PageRank score can be an indicator as to how savvy they are at link building, which is a crucial aspect of SEO. Link popularity should be checked using Yahoo! Site Explorer (siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com). An impressive PageRank score for an SEO company would be an eight, although a seven is pretty good, too. Bear in mind that PageRank scores are several months out of date, and it is possible to temporarily inflate PageRank...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/310/SEO-Report-Card-Shopwildplanetcom 2006-10-01T00:55:00-07:00

This month’s recipient of an SEO critique is Shopwildplanet.com. Since my SEO how-to column this month is on RSS feeds, I thought it would be only fitting that the website that I critique have an RSS feed. Brian Almashie of 3D Joe Corporation, the firm that built the site for Wild Planet, believes they have done a pretty good job of optimizing it. Let’s see if his confidence is well founded. They certainly appear to have a large number of pages indexed in Google: 138,000. This number seemed unbelievable to me, and indeed it was massively over-inflated. As I started digging, I found that many of the pages in Google’s index don’t have titles and snippets. This is significant because it means the pages have not been indexed by Google, and, therefore, won’t show up for most searchers. I then used one of my super-secret SEO tricks to eliminate the bulk of the snippet-less unindexed pages from the results and discovered only 463 English pages. (Dying to know what my...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/309/SEO-RSS-Feeds-Increase-Visibility 2006-10-01T00:50:00-07:00

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a great way to deliver content into the hands of potential website visitors. It is also a channel for syndicating your content onto others’ websites. And, of course, with that comes links—deep links into your latest products, best sellers, articles, buyers guides, blog posts, forum posts, special offers and clearance items—whatever you feature in your RSS feeds. Hopefully you will recall from my past columns how crucial links are to your search-engine rankings. Your RSS feeds are a conduit for reaching influential bloggers who, for whatever reason, have an interest in your site. In addition, your RSS feeds could be picked up by RSS search engines like Feedster, Technorati and Google Blog Search. Many bloggers subscribe to search results feeds from these search engines to keep up with what is happening on a particular topic or industry. Thus, if something featured in your RSS feeds include the keywords that the blogger is tracking with their...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/279/SEO-Breadcrumb-Trail-Boosts-Rankings 2006-09-01T01:07:00-07:00

Breadcrumb navigation is wonderful for usability and for SEO. This text-based navigation shows where in the site hierarchy the currently viewed web page is located and your location within the site, while providing shortcuts to instantly jump higher up the site hierarchy. A product page for a table lamp may have the breadcrumb navigation of “Home > Home Furnishings > Lighting > Table Lamps.” If the breadcrumb contains text links with relevant keywords in the anchor text, that is a significant SEO benefit. Take the “phone systems” link in the figure below. The search engines treat that single link as a “vote” for the phone systems category page. More than that, the anchor text (“phone systems”) provides the search engines with an important, contextual clue as to the topic of the linked page. That equates to improved rankings. Contrast that with the use of throwaway phrases like “click here” or “more info” in the anchor text. Such words provide no clues...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/280/SEO-Report-Card-Yarnwarecom 2006-09-01T00:09:00-07:00

For this SEO Report Card, I’m responding to the Yarnware’s heartfelt plea for a site grade. Meredith Bright of Yarnware writes: “I used to have much better organic search rankings, but they have been dropping recently. I can’t figure out what is wrong.” It wasn’t hard to see why. The site is running Lotus Notes Domino — not a platform that is very friendly to search engines because of its long, complexlooking URLs. However, the issues with the site were much more fundamental. The Yarnware.com site has broken some cardinal rules of SEO. • The first “cardinal sin” was the lack of a title tag on the home page. Remember, the home page is the page given the most weight by search engines. • Another problem was that the site was built in frames. In their Webmaster Guidelines (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34445), Google advises against the use of frames. Yarnware.com is the sort of framed site where users can’t even bookmark...

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/251/SEO-Harness-the-Power-of-CSS 2006-08-01T00:00:00-07:00

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a technology popular with web developers who care about web standards and accessibility. But it should also be a technology embraced by anyone who cares about SEO. You can do amazing things with CSS. For example, you can completely eliminate all use of HTML tables and transparent 1-pixel spacer GIFs for layout (that’s so ‘90s!), replacing all that “code bloat” with succinct, streamlined HTML and stylesheet code. Using tables-based layout not only subjects your customer to longer page download times, it also lowers the keyword prominence of the body copy. In fact, you should strive to completely separate the presentation layer from the content layer (as much as practical) and move all the presentation “stuff” into an external style sheet –– in other words, into a separate .css file. An additional benefit of this approach is that the .css file gets cached by the user’s web browser and doesn’t have to reload with each new page,...