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SEO
SEO Report Card: Stayleaner.com
March 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer
Each month it gets harder to select an ecommerce site to assess, as the requests from readers keep coming in increasing volume. This month I've chosen Stayleaner.com, the ecommerce site for J & J Health Foods, which sells vitamins, herbs and supplements for sports nutrition and body...
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Link Building
SEO: Weaving a Web of Links
March 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer
Links are the currency of the web. Not only do their drive traffic in their own right, but they also are essential to high search engine rankings. Without good inbound links to your web site, your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts won't get off the ground. Link building isn't ab...
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SEO
SEO Report Card: Discountflies.com
February 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer
Welcome back to another installment of “SEO Report Card.” Each month I assess the search engine optimization effectiveness of an ecommerce site. This month's brave volunteer is DiscountFlies.com, an online retailer who sells flies for fly fishing and uses the MIVA Merchant platform. Di...
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Technical SEO
Optimize Your HTML For Search Engines
February 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer
SEO can be broken into two distinct areas – "onpage" factors and "off-page" factors. On-page factors include anything that you can affect on the page itself, such as the title tag, body copy, H1 heading tags, image “alt” attributes, etc. Off-page factors encompass things that influence...
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SEO
SEO Report Card: Balancedlifeproducts.com
January 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer
Welcome to “SEO Report Card”, where I assess how well search engine optimized a selected ecommerce site is. For this first installment, our guinea pig is BalancedLifeProducts.com, a small ecommerce site, based in Madison, Wisconsin, that sells meditation and massage products such as yog...
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SEO
Search Engine Optimization: Avoid Complex URLs
January 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer
Search engines tend to have problems fully indexing dynamic websites (in other words, sites that are hooked up to a database of content). The kinds of sites that search engines have the biggest trouble with are ones that have overly complex URL structures, including numerous variables ...
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SEO
Search Engine Optimization: Writing Effectively
December 1, 2005 • Stephan Spencer
In order to achieve maximum search engine visibility, you need to think a bit like a search engine when writing the copy for your website. Search engines look at the HTML code that makes up your web page and attempts to parse out the textual copy on the page, eliminating the HTML markup...
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Keyword Research
Keyword Sleuthing: Locate the Right Word
November 1, 2005 • Stephan Spencer
Effective SEO starts with keyword research. Chasing after the wrong keywords is a waste, costing time and effort. The "right" keywords are the ones that are not only relevant to your business, but are al...