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Articles by: Jill Kocher Brown

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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.

Marketing & Advertising
SEO: Optimizing Ratings, Reviews and Comments

February 17, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Content that consumers leave on an ecommerce site can improve the site’s search engine optimization, if the platforms and underlying code are set up optimally. Ratings, reviews and comments each play a part in SEO, utilizing the words and opinions that real shoppers voice to strengthen ...
Marketing & Advertising
SEO Impact of Google’s Search Plus Your World

February 3, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

As search and social become ever more entwined in Google’s and Bing’s algorithms and search results, search engine optimizers cannot afford to turn a blind eye to social media. Bing incorporates Facebook data into its search results. Google has taken another big step with the introducti...
Marketing & Advertising
Optimizing a Page for Search Engines, Part 3: Keywords to Content

January 27, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Editor's Note: This is the final installment of a three-part series on optimizing ecommerce pages for search engines. The first two installments, "Part 1: Keyword Research" and “Part 2: Keyword Mapping,” we published previously. I discussed keyword research and content mapping in detai...
Marketing & Advertising
Optimizing a Page for Search Engines, Part 2: Keyword Mapping

January 20, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Editor's Note: This is the second installment of a three-part series on optimizing ecommerce pages for search engines. The first installment, "Part 1: Keyword Research," we published last week. "Part 3: Keywords to Content" we published after the article, below. Keyword research is ess...
Marketing & Advertising
Optimizing a Page for Search Engines, Part 1: Keyword Research

January 13, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Editor’s Note: This is the first installment of a three-part series on optimizing ecommerce pages for search engines. “Part 2: Keyword Mapping” and “Part 3: Keywords to Content” we published ...
Marketing & Advertising
10 Tips to Hire a Great SEO Agency

January 10, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Staying on top of search engine optimization requires time and effort that many small businesses can’t afford in-house. One obvious solution is to turn to an agency. But which ones can be trusted and which will under deliver and overcharge? Before just picking the number one result in a...
Marketing & Advertising
Using Social Buttons to Enhance Search Engine Optimization

January 4, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Social "signals" increasingly influence search results in both Google and Bing. The search engines are coming to consider social signals as more indicative of how searchers value a page than traditional link signals — though links remain very important to search engine optimization. In ...
Marketing & Advertising
How to Benefit from Googlebot-Mobile’s New Smarts

December 16, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Google’s mobile crawler Googlebot-Mobile has traditionally focused on content designed for feature phones and their extremely limited browsers. Google recently announced, however, a new version of Googlebot-Mobile that crawls using an iPhone user agent, enabling it to discover content d...
Marketing & Advertising
Managing SEO and Social Media Together

December 13, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

How etailers manage their social media marketing channel has a growing impact on organic search results. Google and Bing have both incorporated social data into their algorithms to signal content freshness and quality. While the datasets each engine has access to differ, the fact remain...
Marketing & Advertising
5 Conversion Tools for SEO and Beyond

November 29, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

The quickest path to earning more from an ecommerce site's organic search traffic is to convert more consumers who already go there. I addressed that topic previously, at "SEO: Convert More Before Driving More." Many SEO strategies focus on driving more visitors. But what use is driv...
Marketing & Advertising
SEO: Letting Customers Generate Long Tail Search Terms

November 23, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization typically focuses on the trophy terms, the high-volume keyword phrases, because marketers need to drive the highest value with the lowest effort. Unfortunately, those juicy trophy terms are great for brand recognition and customers' initial awareness, but they...
Marketing & Advertising
Syndicating Content for SEO Benefit

November 18, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

When ecommerce companies think about content syndication, they typically consider acquiring content that others have written to beef up their own sites. Depending on the goal, placing content from other sites onto your own can be beneficial from a branding, partnership, or reference poi...
Marketing & Advertising
Does SEO Conflict with User-Friendly Websites?

November 3, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Google's so-called "Farmer/Panda" algorithm update rewards original, high-quality site content. Aggregators suffer under Panda, as do ecommerce merchants who rely on generic product descriptions that are not unique to their sites, or who offer poor content generally. We've addressed t...
Marketing & Advertising
Navigation: Your Biggest On-Site SEO Asset

October 28, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

A site's navigational links can help its search engine optimization. Links pass "link popularity," little votes of value, from the linking page to the destination page. In addition, the link's anchor text — the visible text portion of the link — passes a relevance signal. Relevance and...
Conversion
SEO: Convert More Before Driving More

October 20, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Many organic search marketers focus on increasing rankings and traffic to a site. What happens to that traffic once it hits the site, they assume, is someone else's problem. This is a wrong approach. Search marketing's ultimate goal isn't usually to drive more traffic; it's to convert m...
Marketing & Advertising
SEO: Using Affiliates for Search Marketing

October 13, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Working in the organic search industry, I’ve often had large search marketing clients who envied the success of their affiliates, which sometimes outperformed their own in-house search marketing efforts. But Carolyn Tang Kmet opened my eyes to the ways that search affiliates can actuall...
Marketing & Advertising
SEO Report Card: SolsticeSupply.com, Part 2

October 7, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Over two years ago, we published an "SEO Report Card" for SolsticeSupply.com, an ecommerce site dedicated to closeout winter goods ranging from skis and snowboards to winter apparel. With a final grade of D+, the review didn't go well for founder Justin Clapick, who requested it. Clapic...
Marketing & Advertising
SEO Sidecars More Trouble than They’re Worth

September 30, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

I'll get right to the point. You can't bolt a couple of pages onto the edge of your ecommece site like a sidecar to a motorcycle and call it search engine optimization. Or, rather, you can launch your SEO sidecar but it won't achieve the organic search performance you desire without app...
Marketing & Advertising
Google’s +1 Expansion Boosts Search and Social

August 31, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

The Google +1 button now plays a much more visible role in promoting content in search and social marketing. Much like Facebook's Like button, Google's +1 button allows — as of last week — Google+ users to share a comment, an image, a headline and a snippet of text when +1'ing a page. C...
Marketing & Advertising
SEO: Automating Keyword Selection with AdWords API

August 23, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Optimizing a website around highly searched keyword terms can materially increase traffic from search engines. But identifying those keywords takes time. Few SEO managers relish the tedium of slogging through thousands of keyword variations — as critical as that process is to a search-e...
Marketing & Advertising
Google+: The Beginning of a Revolution?

July 29, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

The pieces are rapidly falling into place for Google’s increasing integration of “social signals” into its search algorithms. With the oddly isolated “+1” button launch at the end of March ...
Marketing & Advertising
Google Says Smartphone Sites Aren’t Mobile

June 14, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Perhaps you’ve noticed the lack of mobile sites in your mobile search results. Most likely you’re using a smartphone. The two are closely related, and bode poorly for ecommerce companies focusing search-engine-optimization resources on their smartphone sites. In a recent question-and-an...
Marketing & Advertising
SEO: Is a Mobile Site Necessary to Win Mobile Searchers?

May 16, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Today’s superphones finally make mobile search a reality. After all, they sport 1GHz processors, 4 inch screens, 4G data connections and browsers that can execute Flash and JavaScript with relative ...
Marketing & Advertising
SEO Case Study: When Past SEO Efforts Hurt Today’s Traffic

April 15, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Editor’s Note: This is the third installment of a search-engine-optimization case study from contributor Jill Kocher on the SEO struggles of The Motor Bookstore, a retailer of automotive manuals. The Motorbook ...
Marketing & Advertising
SEO Case Study: Improving the Site’s Architecture

March 25, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Editor's Note: This is the second installment of a search-engine-optimization case study from contributor Jill Kocher on the SEO travails of The Motor Bookstore, a retailer of automotive manuals. Like most ecommerce businesses, The Motorbook Store relies heavily on traffic from search ...
Marketing & Advertising
SEO Case Study: One Store’s Struggle with Google Updates

March 17, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

In an effort to increase the quality of its search results, Google launched an update in late February dubbed the “Farmer/Panda Update” by the search-engine-optimization industry. The update affected 12 percent of Google’s results, decreasing organic traffic for sites like the one owned...
Marketing & Advertising
J.C. Penney Incurs Google SEO ‘Action’; How to Protect Your Own Company

February 15, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search-engine-optimization agencies often play a vital role in ecommerce sites, where winning and converting organic searches to sales directly impacts the e-tailer’s bottom line. But how far should a company trust an SEO agency to act on its behalf? The SEO community erupted this weeke...
Marketing & Advertising
Geolocation Helpful to Merchants, Tricky for SEO

February 3, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Identifying where an online consumer lives can be helpful to ecommerce merchants. Among visitors to an ecommerce site, there's differences in language, currency, and climate. A clothing merchant, for example, would presumably offer different items to a visitor from Alaska than from, say...
Marketing & Advertising
SEO Consequences of Negative Reviews

November 30, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown

An alarming new flavor of search engine optimization surfaced on Friday when The New York Times reported on DecorMyEyes, an unscrupulous eyewear etailer who goads customers into writing negative reviews for SEO benefit. Nothing boosts a well-crawled site’s rankings higher than an infusi...
Marketing & Advertising
Bing Social Search: Are ‘Likes’ the New Links?

October 28, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown

Organic search revolves increasingly around personalization, delivering relevance not just to a searcher’s literal query, but also to the implied intent, geographic location, and historical preferences. Earlier this month Bing took another step toward integrating Facebook’s social dat...

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