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
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...
Product Pages
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...
Influencers & Affiliates
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...
SEO
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...
SEO
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...
Social Media
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...
Keyword Research
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...
Social Media
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 ...
User Experience
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...
User Experience
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 ...
SEO
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 ...
Technical SEO
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 ...
SEO
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...
SEO
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...
Cross-border Selling
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...
SEO
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...
Link Building
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...
Technical SEO
SEO: Understanding Advanced Search Operators

September 30, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown

Let’s face it, the engines control search. They may keep tight-lipped control of their algorithmic secrets, but they also provide their users with tools that SEO practitioners can use to understand how the engines see their sites. These advanced operators offer a peek behind the curtain...
SEO
Google ‘Instant’ a Game Changer?

September 17, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown

Last week, Google introduced "Instant," a feature that predicts searchers’ queries as they type them and streams the results for that predicted query onto the results page in real time. Google announced Instant on its blog, at "Search: now faster than the speed of type." Google Instan...
Technical SEO
SEO: Unique Content Good for Search Engines, Good for Consumers

September 3, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown

Unique, valuable content is a critical part of a successful SEO strategy. That is especially the case for ecommerce sites that utilize non-unique stock product descriptions from the manufacturer’s database. But, I’m often asked if there’s a faster, cheaper, free way to generate content....
SEO
SEO for Anti-SEO Business Models

July 29, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown

I recently changed SEO jobs. I went from an agency that manages clients' search-engine-optimization efforts, to an in-house SEO manager for a single company. I knew previously, from working with many ecommerce clients, that business models and product offerings have an impact on SEO suc...
Technical SEO
SEO MAYDAY: Analyzing the Impact of Algorithmic Changes

May 13, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown

Google makes periodic adjustments to its algorithm that determines organic search results. It likely does this each day, using small adjustments, to avoid large-scale mayhem that infrequent adjustments would presumably cause. Recently, however, many SEO professionals have detected dram...
Technical SEO
SEO: Google Ranks Site Speed, Too

April 19, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown

In its continuing quest to provide searchers with the best possible search experience, Google announced last week that site speed is now a signal in its search ranking algorithms. Along with the hundreds of other signals, like link popularity and keyword relevance, Google is now factori...
Cross-border Selling
SEO: Grow Multinational Sales With Geo-targeting “Signals”

March 18, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown

Driving organic search traffic and sales through multinational search engine optimization requires a fusion of keyword relevance and geo-targeting to send location relevance signals. The search engines have to decipher a site’s geo-targeting signals to deliver the right page in the righ...
Link Building
SEO: Link Bait Can Increase Rankings

February 17, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown

Link bait is the practice of creating useful or compelling content that will lure links naturally to a website. It’s fun, it’s trendy, and it can produce very big search-engine-optimization results. Contrary to most interactive marketing goals, link bait’s primary goal is increasing t...
SEO
Stalking Competitors’ SEO Tactics

January 20, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown

Despite my contention that Internet marketers need to stop obsessing about rankings, an examination of the SEO tactics of competitors that outrank your site can be extremely enlightening. Stalking a competitor's SEO tactics can uncover content optimization and link building opportunitie...
Technical SEO
SEO: Capture More Search Traffic with Rich Snippets

December 16, 2009 • Jill Kocher Brown

The difference between a snippet and a rich snippet is the difference between just showing up at a party and showing up in style. Showing up in style can ensure you get the attention you want. For an ecommerce merchant, "the party" is a search engine's results page. A snippet is your U...
Technical SEO
SEO: Forgotten Content Can Damage Search Performance

November 17, 2009 • Jill Kocher Brown

Sometimes a site’s own past dampens its bright SEO future. The forgotten designs, old campaigns, and abandoned domains that accumulate unnoticed in a web server can have a negative impact on a site’s ability to rank and drive natural search-referred traffic and sales. Search engines ret...
Technical SEO
SEO: There Is No Duplicate Content Penalty

October 15, 2009 • Jill Kocher Brown

There is a long held belief that search engines – namely Google – penalize websites that duplicate content or produce material that is largely the same as other sites on the Internet. But, I’m here to tell you, The Duplicate Content Penalty is a myth. Think about it this way. If a page...
SEO
SEO: Search Engine Rankings Vary Among Searchers

September 16, 2009 • Jill Kocher Brown

Rankings have long been a valued metric in search marketing. After all, it's easy to monitor and seems like a really important measure. However, if you really want to measure the effectiveness of your SEO campaign, stop obsessing about rankings. Proactively changing the focus of your c...