Jill Kocher Brown

Articles by: Jill Kocher Brown

Jill Kocher Brown

Jill Kocher Brown is a writer and search engine optimization expert in Chicago. She has been living and breathing search engine optimization since 2005, and has been in digital marketing since 1996.

Jill cut her digital teeth at Intel, managing the home page and corporate sections of Intel.com. After that, Jill managed and developed ecommerce SEO consulting practices at Netconcepts and Covario, served as Groupon’s first in-house SEO director, and pioneered IBM's SEO consulting practice.

She now heads up the SEO practice at JumpFly, a marketing agency.

Jill holds a B.A. in Communications and American Studies from Stanford University. Email JIll.

Technical SEO
SEO: Optimal Ecommerce URLs

February 1, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown

The ecommerce platform that hosts a site determines the URL structure, which in turn can have an impact on the site’s search engine optimization. Each platform creates URLs according to its own rules, but nearly all can be modified for greater SEO and brand recognition. In years past, ...
Social Media
Facebook Takes on Local Search

January 17, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown

Consumers use the Internet to search for local businesses, events, and topics. Google is a major player in local search, but so is Bing, Yahoo!, Yelp, YellowPages.com, Foursquare, and other sites. Local search now has a new competitor: Facebook Graph Search. Launched this week, Facebo...
SEO
SEO New Year’s Resolutions for 2013

January 4, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown

With a new year ahead, it’s time to think about New Year’s resolutions. What do you want search engine optimization to do for your site in 2013? The most likely goals for any ecommerce site revolve around driving more traffic and converting more visitors. Let’s look at some steps for an...
Technical SEO
SEO: When Product Facets and Filters Fail

December 21, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Ecommerce sites rely on filtered or faceted navigation to make their product catalogs more easily digestible for customers. Depending on how filters and facets are implemented, however, they can either be fantastic for search engine optimization or a big failure. SEO is based on three ...
Technical SEO
SEO: Working Around a Redesign

December 14, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

When a redesign or platform change looms in your site’s future, it’s easy to turn off all search-engine-optimization work and focus on planning the new site. After all, why bother making changes that will just be overwritten when you launch the new site? Focusing on a few key areas will...
SEO
The SEO Benefit of Infographics

December 7, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization professionals don't usually recommend creating more images, but infographics can have a real benefit to SEO. Typically, images are used in place of textual content to convey the same message visually. Consequently, images tend to be viewed as detrimental to SE...
Keyword Research
Using Keyword Research beyond SEO

November 30, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Keyword research is one of the foundational pieces of search engine optimization because it illuminates the exact words real-life customers use to search for the products we sell. But why stop there? The insights that keyword research provides can inform other many other areas of the bu...
Analytics & Data
How to Measure SEO Performance

November 14, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization may be a mix of art and science, but it’s as measurable and accountable as other online marketing channels. Knowing what key performance indicators to measure for SEO is the first step. Establishing a regular routine for monitoring and measuring performance wi...
Technical SEO
4 Fast Ways to Kill Your SEO

November 9, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization experts usually focus on what you should do to improve your site’s organic search rankings. In this post, I'm asking the opposite question: What are the fastest ways to destroy your site’s SEO performance? Here's a list of my top four mistakes. Mistake 1: Lau...
Link Building
SEO: 3 Ways to Grow Links to Your Ecommerce Site

November 2, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization relies in large part on relevant content and authoritative links from other sites. As the search engines develop ever-more stringent algorithms around relevance and authority, it becomes harder to acquire links that will actually matter to your site’s SEO effo...
SEO
Understanding Google’s Algorithm Updates

October 26, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

The term "webspam" refers to low-quality sites that use manipulative search engine optimization strategies to win rankings and traffic. Google’s war on webspam has reached an all-time high, with the search giant churning out an average of one-to-two updates a day. Understanding these al...
Social Media
YouTube’s Time Watched Algorithm Update

October 19, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

In the past, YouTube measured a video’s popularity based on the number of clicks it received. Last Friday the video search giant changed its algorithm — here's the blog post at YouTube — to take the time spent watching a video into account. As a result, ecommerce sites wanting to attrac...
Keyword Research
SEO: Marshaling Your Keyword Army

October 12, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Content optimization for search engines seems straightforward. You research the keywords that your customers use most frequently and you use them on your site in the places that matter most to search engine algorithms. But deciding which keywords to apply to individual pages when you’re...
User Experience
Smartphones, Tablets Account for 1 in 8 Visits

October 5, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

One in eight pages accessed on the Internet in the U.S. today are viewed on mobile devices, according to a report by comScore. Mobile phones account for 9 percent of Internet visits and tablets make up another 4 percent. It begs the question: What sort of experience are those mobile use...
Technical SEO
SEO: Putting Navigation to Work

September 28, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Navigation does more than shuttling customers around your site. In addition to its obvious usability and design functions, navigation can be optimized to improve organic search traffic. Well-optimized navigation strengthens the flow of link popularity throughout your site while sending ...
SEO
SEO Ranking Forecast: 74 and Sunny

September 21, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

One of the hardest aspects of search engine optimization is determining whether changes in your site’s organic search results are based on changes to your own site or external influences like algorithm changes. SEOmoz created MozCast weather report to help answer this question, and tod...
On-page SEO
SEO: Using Automated Landing Pages

September 14, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Marketing automation tools make creating landing pages a snap. They focus on making it more efficient to deliver relevant content to relevant individuals at relevant times via email and paid search campaigns. So why not use them to create landing pages for search engine optimization cam...
Technical SEO
SEO: Avoiding Penguins and Pandas

September 7, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Google’s recent penchant for naming major algorithmic updates after animals has the world of search engine optimization sounding more like a zookeeper’s dilemma. But with rumors of an impending Penguin update — see this article from Search Engine Roundtable — right around the corner, e...
Technical SEO
SEO: Launching a Redesigned Site

August 31, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Editor's Note: This is part two of a two-part series on identifying, assessing, and mitigating the risk of site redesigns on organic search traffic. Part one, "SEO: Identifying the Impact of a Site Redesign," we published last week. Launching a redesigned site is filled with potentiall...
Technical SEO
SEO: Identifying the Impact of a Site Redesign

August 24, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Editor's Note: This is part one of a two-part series on identifying, assessing, and mitigating the risk of site redesigns on organic search traffic. Part two, "Launching a Redesigned Site," we will publish next week. Site redesigns can create a period of intense instability for organi...
Keyword Research
SEO: Using Excel for Keyword Analysis

August 17, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Excel is the SEO tool I use most frequently. Excel helps me organize my thoughts, decide which keywords or pages to focus on, illustrate key concepts, and even draft rudimentary content. This article lists my favorite Excel formulas, menu items, and keyboard shortcuts for search engin...
SEO
4 Simple Visuals to Explain SEO

August 10, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

When talking to marketers, it can be nearly impossible to get them to look beyond the brand imagery and user experience they’ve crafted for their customers online. And while they’re locked into that perception of their sites, it’s very difficult to explain why search engines don’t perce...
Local Business
SEO: Can Local Searchers Find Your Stores?

August 3, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Online location pages of physical stores should provide much more information than just the physical address of a store close to the individual user. Many consumers already know where a store is, based on their everyday routines. What they don’t know and are seeking are the hours, holid...
Technical SEO
5 SEO Shortcuts to Avoid

July 12, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engines are programmed to reward relevance and popularity, and are striving to algorithmically determine quality as well. Ecommerce sites are programmed to sell product to customers as efficiently as possible while offering a positive brand experience. Ecommerce sites often striv...
Google Ads
Google Shopping’s Impact on SEO

July 6, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Over the next several months, Google’s free Product Search feature will start costing ecommerce sites a lot more. Since the launch of Google’s Froogle in 2002, Google has provided a free product search service. The newly launched Google Shopping marks the first time that the company has...
Technical SEO
SEO: Understanding XML Sitemaps

June 29, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

XML sitemaps serve a very niche purpose in search engine optimization: facilitating indexation. Posting an XML sitemap is kind of like rolling out the red carpet for search engines and giving them a roadmap of the preferred routes through the site. It’s the site owner’s chance to tell c...
Keyword Research
SEO Keywords: ‘Red Roses’ vs. ‘Roses Red’

June 22, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engines are code-driven, logic-based pieces of software and hardware that know and do what they’re programmed to do: rank data gathered from crawling websites according to specific algorithms against searchers’ queries. Those algorithms based on keyword relevance prefer exact mat...
SEO
SEO Report Card: MotoGP Store, Part 2

June 7, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

The MotoGP Store volunteered for an SEO Report Card. This is the second installment of my analysis of that site. In "Part 1," I reviewed the home page and category pages, internal navigation, HTML templates, title tags and keyword choices on, again, The MotoGP Store. Now I'll look at UR...
SEO
SEO Report Card: MotoGP Store, Part 1

June 1, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Every now and then an ecommerce site raises its hand for an "SEO Report Card." It’s a great way for the site to get some free advice and a good link, and an interesting way to give Practical eCommerce some, well, practical tips on how we’d handle SEO challenges with real ecommerce sites...
SEO
Why Does SEO Take So Long?

May 25, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search marketing’s two halves are so similar and yet so different. A new pay-per-click advertising campaign can be set up and pushed live, and data starts to roll in that same day. Within a week there may be enough data to analyze performance, tweak and iterate the optimization of the c...