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Keyword Research
SEO: Getting More from Google’s Keyword Planner
March 21, 2014 • Jill Kocher Brown
Keyword research is the foundation of search engine optimization. Keyword data allows us to peek into consumers’ desires and analyze what they really want. Google AdWords Keyword Planner opens that window ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: What to Do When Site Traffic Hits Bottom
March 14, 2014 • Jill Kocher Brown
It’s a search marketer’s worst nightmare: Your SEO performance has hit rock bottom and you have no idea why. It may be comforting to remember that there is a reason that ...
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Technical SEO
How SEO Integrates into Site Design
March 7, 2014 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engine optimization performs best when it’s integrated into website design and maintenance programs. That’s because so many of the decisions that impact SEO occur outside of the bounds of ...
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SEO Tools
SEO: Bing Webmaster Tools for the Other 20 Percent
February 28, 2014 • Jill Kocher Brown
Since Google is the largest search engine, its webmaster tools gets the lion’s share of attention. But depending on your industry and audience, Bing and Yahoo may drive around 20
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SEO
5 Excuses Why Ecommerce Merchants Avoid SEO
February 21, 2014 • Jill Kocher Brown
You’re presumably reading this because you want more: more traffic, more sales, more effective methods of reaching your marketing goals. Search engine optimization can help you reach those goals, but ...
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SEO
SEO Performance Reporting in the Datapocalypse
February 7, 2014 • Jill Kocher Brown
Thanks to the major U.S. search engines implementing secure search, the keywords that drive organic search referrals are no longer available for meaningful analysis in web analytics. The SEO datapocalypse ...
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SEO
SEO as Stand-alone Tactic Is Dead
January 31, 2014 • Jill Kocher Brown
Stop doing search engine optimization as a separate discipline. Instead, make sure all aspects of your online business — content, marketing, site design, architecture — are naturally optimized for search ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Yahoo’s New Secure Search Removes Referral Data
January 24, 2014 • Jill Kocher Brown
Yahoo has moved to secure search by default, effectively removing all referral data that indicates the source of the search and which keywords were searched for. The secure search update ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: How to Create a 301 Redirect Map, for Site Redesigns
January 17, 2014 • Jill Kocher Brown
In a website redesign where URLs change, whether your search-engine-optimization goal is to protect existing natural search performance or boost it to a new level, an ironclad 301 redirect strategy is critical. In “For Redesigns, Protect SEO with 301 Redirect Strategy,” my previous article, I outlined why
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Technical SEO
For Redesigns, Protect SEO with 301 Redirect Strategy
January 10, 2014 • Jill Kocher Brown
In most website redesigns, search engine optimization relies on an accurate, complete, and flawlessly executed 301 redirect strategy. An ironclad 301 redirect strategy preserves as much as 85 percent of the link authority that the current site has earned over its lifetime and funnels it into the new site to
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SEO Tools
My Favorite SEO Tools
December 20, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search marketers’ toolboxes differ based on the type of optimization in which they specialize and how comfortable they are with raw data versus ready-to-use graphs. Many helpful tools aren’t specifically made ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Managing Faceted Search
December 13, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
Faceted site search can help ecommerce shoppers quickly find the products they are looking for. But faceted search can shatter your search engine optimization efforts. What can you do, therefore,
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SEO
SEO: Leveraging Bing’s Pinterest Integration
December 6, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
Pinterest generates a lot of social media marketing excitement among brands that have visually attractive products to promote. But to date, Pinterest hasn’t offered as much natural search benefit. Bing’s October ...
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On-page SEO
To Improve SEO, Focus on the Page
November 22, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
If you want to drive more natural search visits to a page, you need to improve the relevance and authority of that page. That’s SEO 101. But one of the ...
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SEO
Google Helpouts Can Share your Brand’s Expertise
November 15, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
Most every ecommerce business can claim expertise in something. You wouldn’t be in business if you weren’t at least knowledgeable — and likely passionate — about the products or services ...
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SEO
Quick SEO Tips to Boost Holiday Sales
November 4, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
The holiday selling season is in full swing. If your natural search visits and sales are falling short of your goals, try these quick search-engine-optimization tips to give them a ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: 5 Ways to Avoid Indexation
October 25, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
It sounds counterintuitive, but sometimes the goal of search engine optimization is avoiding indexation. Consider the following scenarios. Faceted navigation spews out thousands of pages of duplicate or low value content. Email landing ...
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SEO
SEO Review: Glamor and Glitz But Few Organic Clicks
October 18, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
Fashion-oriented stationer Pergamino has an organic search traffic problem – there’s not enough of it. Founder and Chief Creative Officer Monica Luburich reached out for an SEO review to find ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Google’s Hummingbird Changes the Ecommerce Game
October 11, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
Google released its Hummingbird search algorithm under the radar in August. Hummingbird reportedly impacts 90 percent of all search queries. So how does Hummingbird change the game for ecommerce sites? With ...
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Content Marketing
Using SEO to Drive Content Marketing
October 4, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
If you think search engine optimization is just keyword repetition and directory submissions to fatten up your link profile, you’re living in 2006. Modern SEO is central to content marketing,
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Keyword Research
Understanding Google’s Keyword ‘Not Provided’ Data
September 27, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
Google quietly released major changes to its search product this month to, among other things, move toward encrypting all search activity. The move is touted as an effort to protect ...
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Social Media
Does Pinterest Help with SEO?
September 20, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
The intersection of organic search and Pinterest is actually very small. Still, Pinterest does have a place in search engine optimization as a way to expand a site’s search result ...
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Keyword Research
SEO: Is your Site Relevant for that Keyword?
September 13, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
Understanding the interplay between search relevance and intent can mean the difference between a well optimized site and a lot of time wasted chasing keywords for which you’ll never rank. Organic ...
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Technical SEO
SEO Traffic Changes When URLs Change
September 6, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
You may have noticed that we recently updated Practical Ecommerce with a fresh, new design. Behind the scenes, a lot of things changed as we moved to a new platform,
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Social Media
SEO: 5 Reasons Not to Ignore Google+
August 30, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
Two years ago when Google+ launched, I had high hopes for its value as a marketing platform to rival Facebook and Twitter. Read my enthusiastic missal, “Google+: The Beginning of ...
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Google Ads
Google Offers Paid and Organic Search Report
August 23, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
Paid and organic search work better together. Because searchers inherently trust that search engines are recommending the best pages in search results, when brands rank well in both paid and ...
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SEO Tools
SEO: Google Adds Manual Spam Actions to Webmaster Tools
August 9, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
Google Webmaster Tools launched its new manual spam actions feature yesterday, enabling verified site owners to check whether their site has been manually penalized by Google. Over the last couple of years, Google has slowly increased its communication to webmasters, with the goal of ...
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Link Building
SEO: Google Devalues another Link-building Tactic
August 2, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
Google’s search result quality mission stands seemingly opposed to the search engine optimization practice of link building. For years, SEO professionals have worked to increase the number of external in-bound links to a site in an effort to build authority and trust, thus boosting orga...
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SEO
SEO: 2 Months of Algorithm Updates
July 26, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
If your organic search metrics have been fluctuating more than usual recently, you’re in good company. Google rolled out four notable algorithm updates in the two months between May 21 and July 15, including a Panda update and the much-anticipated Penguin 2.0 update. Each of the updat...
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Keyword Research
SEO: Using Google’s New Keyword Planner
July 19, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
Keywords are the foundation of search engine optimization. They’re what searchers type in Google’s search box, and what marketers incorporate into their web pages to attract searchers to their sites. Google recently launched a new tool that changes the way we research keywords: AdWords ...