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Technical SEO
SEO: Manage Crawling, Indexing with Robots Exclusion Protocol
April 2, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
Indexing is the precursor to ranking in organic search. But there are pages you don’t want the search engines to index and rank. That’s where the "robots exclusion protocol" comes into play.
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Technical SEO
SEO: Using Canonical Tags to Reduce Duplicate Content
March 23, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
Canonical tags are an essential tool to prevent duplicate content in organic search results. "Canonical" in search engine parlance means the one true page out of potentially many duplicates.
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Technical SEO
SEO: 7 Ways Ecommerce Sites Create Duplicate Content
March 15, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
I've never worked with an ecommerce platform that was entirely free of duplicate content. Some platforms are better at containing the sprawl. But one change in the settings or the code could accidentally produce duplicates — i.e., different pages with different URLs for the same piece of content.
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Amazon & Marketplaces
3 SEO Lessons from Amazon for Ecommerce Product Pages
March 8, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
Product detail pages on Amazon rank for roughly 34 million keywords in Google in the U.S. In this post, I'll address three tips for optimizing the product pages on your own ecommerce site using lessons from Amazon.
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Technical SEO
SEO: Why Your Faceted Navigation Pages Aren’t Ranking
March 1, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
The filters and facets utilized by ecommerce sites allow shoppers to quickly narrow a product set by color, style, or other attributes. It's called faceted navigation. It's ideal for targeting keywords with midsized demand. And it can seriously boost organic search traffic.
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Technical SEO
Google Downgrades Nofollow Directive. Now What?
February 24, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
On March 1, Google will no longer consider nofollow attributes as commands. Instead, they will be hints, much like canonical tags. Until now, nofollow attributes have been a protective barrier between your site's authority and the potentially questionable sites it links to.
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On-page SEO
Scalable SEO Strategies to Boost Category Pages
February 20, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
Large-scale improvements in organic search performance require large-scale changes. Ecommerce merchants tend to optimize product detail pages. Many merchants overlook category pages, which can provide more organic-search opportunities.
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Technical SEO
6 Ways to Know If Your SEO Is Broken
February 9, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
Gut feel. That's how ecommerce marketers sometimes gauge the health of their search engine optimization program. SEO contains many gray areas, for sure. But an evaluation requires data, not a hunch. Use these six methods — in order — to determine the health of your SEO program.
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Technical SEO
SEO: 7 Shopper-grabbing Rich Snippets for Ecommerce
February 2, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
It’s increasingly difficult for organic search listings — the 10 blue links — to win the click. Rich snippets, which are powered by structured data, can make your links stand out. Here seven types of rich snippets that enhance blue links and thus drive clicks and sales.
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SEO
Google’s ‘Host-crowding’ Tweak Impacts Sites with Featured Snippets
January 26, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
The term "host crowding" refers to multiple organic search listings from a single domain for the same query. With its latest update, Google changed host crowding by removing the traditional organic listing on page 1 when that site occupies the featured snippet.
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Technical SEO
How to Rank in Google’s New Popular Products
January 19, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
Facing declining product searches thanks to marketplaces such as Amazon and Walmart, Google amped up its ecommerce search game last week with a new organic search feature: popular products.
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Staffing
Outsourcing SEO Starts with Knowing Your Needs
January 13, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
Ecommerce merchants have many choices for outsourcing search engine optimization. Finding the right agency often comes down to knowing your business's needs, as well as understanding the different types of SEO services.
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Technical SEO
5 Obstacles to SEO Success
December 20, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
I’ve worked in SEO for 14 years. In my experience, the following five deficiencies will likely block efforts to improve organic search performance
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SEO
5 SEO Wives’ Tales That Won’t Go Away
December 13, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
There’s a wives’ tale that white wine will remove a red-wine stain. Another claims that eating an apple a day will keep a doctor away. Similarly, many wives’ tales surround search engine optimization. The five below I hear the most from clients and other marketers.
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SEO
How to Make SEO Happen in 2020
December 6, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Effective search engine optimization takes preparation and planning. Random action produces haphazard results. Here’s how to make your SEO plans come to life in 2020.
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SEO
The 8 Benefits of SEO for Ecommerce
November 24, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Ecommerce businesses live and die by their ability to attract new customers. In the race to increase revenue, traffic from organic search can be essential. Here’s why.
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SEO
For Ecommerce SEO, Don’t Ignore the Long Tail
November 17, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engine optimization typically focuses on popular keywords. However, long-tail SEO targets keywords that are searched for less frequently but drive value in the aggregate.
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Content Marketing
Could Blogging Boost Your Ecommerce SEO?
November 10, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Blogging comes and goes as a fashionable marketing tactic, but its potential for search engine optimization remains constant. Blogging isn’t a slam-dunk strategy for every ecommerce business, however. These seven reasons will help you decide whether blogging could help your ecommerce SEO.
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Technical SEO
For SEO, How Fast Is Fast Enough?
November 3, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Page speed improvements are high on most ecommerce to-do lists. The potential for increased revenue as well as better organic search rankings makes the effort worthwhile. But first, everyone wants to know how fast is fast enough.
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On-page SEO
SEO: Google’s BERT Update Helps Ecommerce Product Pages
October 27, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Google’s BERT algorithm, released last week, is the company’s latest effort to understand the intent of search queries. For ecommerce sites, the unique details on product pages could now drive more organic search traffic with high purchase intent.
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SEO
SEO: Expertise in 1 Area Can Lead to Weakness in Others
October 20, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Excelling in one area of search engine optimization can lead to weaknesses in others. I've seen it many times. If your organic search channel isn’t growing despite the effort you’re pouring into it, assess whether you are blind to the real issue. Here are three examples.
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Technical SEO
7 SEO ‘Rules’ to Ignore for Ecommerce
October 13, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engine optimization tools have evolved into measuring hundreds of variables. But not all of them impact ecommerce performance in my experience. What follows are seven common SEO metrics to ignore, or relegate to a quick glance.
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Technical SEO
7 Coding Barriers to SEO Success
October 6, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Googlebot obeys only certain commands, ignores forms and cookies, and crawls only the links coded with a proper anchor tag and href. What follows are seven items that block Googlebot and other search engine bots from crawling (and indexing) all of your web pages.
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Content Marketing
SEO Critique of 3 Ecommerce Blogs
September 29, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Quality blog content can drive organic search traffic. Ecommerce marketers who reject blogging — or give up after a couple of months — miss out. In this post, I'll critique three ecommerce blogs for their SEO benefits.
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SEO
Google Muzzles ‘Self-serving’ Review Snippets
September 22, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
With a new algorithm, Google is determined to remove "self-serving" reviews from rich snippets in search results. Thankfully for ecommerce companies, traditional product reviews on product pages shouldn’t be affected.
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Content Marketing
6 Types of Content That Help SEO (and Shoppers)
September 6, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Modern search engine optimization relies on providing valuable content that improves a site’s customer experience. But the form it should take often stymies site owners. The six sites below prove that any ecommerce site can create valuable content that appeals both to shoppers and the search engines that send them.
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Technical SEO
SEO: HTML, XML Sitemaps Explained
August 30, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
There are two types of sitemaps: HTML and XML. HTML sitemaps guide visitors, mostly. XML sitemaps guide search engine bots, to ensure they find a site’s URLs to index. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each will help with your search engine optimization.
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Technical SEO
6-step SEO Indexation Audit for Ecommerce
August 25, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engines need to index your site before it can rank. But it's not always obvious if a search index contains the correct pages. Content that should be indexed may not be. And content that should not be indexed often is. Use the following six steps to ensure that the right pages are indexed across your ecommerce site.
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Technical SEO
8-step SEO Crawl Audit for Ecommerce
August 18, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Your site won’t rank if search engine bots can’t crawl it. And hidden doors that don’t impact human visitors can lock bots out. Use these eight steps to ensure search bots can access all of your ecommerce site.
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SEO
4 Ways Google Defines ‘Quality’
August 8, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
One of the most frustrating elements of search engine optimization has been Google's attempt to address quality. Now we have Google’s definition of “quality.” In a blog post this week, Google listed 20 questions that determine quality, across four key areas.