SEO
Our huge library of search engine optimization articles addresses strategies and tactics for ecommerce businesses. Our 12-part “How-to” series explains the basics. Advanced topics include faceted navigation, crawling and indexing, cross-border optimization, and much more.
Keyword Research | Link Building | On-page SEO | SEO Tools | Technical SEO-
Technical SEO
How Query Intent Impacts Ecommerce SEO
February 21, 2019 • Bill Sebald
Google attempts to understand the intent of a searcher's query. The company recognizes the burden of providing the best results, even if the query is vague. For example, if someone types in “jaguar,” Google has to figure out what that searcher wants.
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Keyword Research
SEO: Free Keyword Research in 3 Steps
February 8, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
There are many expensive tools that claim to simplify and speed up the keyword research process. If you don’t have thousands of dollars in your budget, however, there’s always the old-school, free method.
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SEO
How Does Google Find and Index Web Pages?
February 6, 2019 • Armando Roggio
When a potential customer enters a query on Google, searching for the products your business sells, she is not actually searching the live internet. Rather, she is looking up web pages on Google's index of the internet. In a sense, this consumer is searching the recent, known web rather than the real-time, live web.
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SEO
How to Do a Competitive SEO Analysis
February 4, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Keeping up with the Joneses in search engine optimization starts with clicking and scrolling in the search results. Copying competitors won’t help you outrank them — at best you’ll keep pace. Instead, identify what they’re doing well, and then do it better.
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On-page SEO
Rise of Mobile Users Alters SEO Tactics
January 31, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
The percentage of U.S. searchers clicking on advertisements in Google search results is growing. Likewise, the percentage of visitors that click nothing is also growing. But the percentage of visitors that click natural search listings is shrinking.
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Link Building
SEO: Reclaiming Lost Links from Site Migrations
January 21, 2019 • Bill Sebald
There is a little-used opportunity for longtime retailers to gain links. If your ecommerce site has changed platforms in its lifetime, you might have editorial links — legitimate, not spam — waiting for you to reclaim.
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SEO
SEO: 6 Things to Do When You Have Nothing to Do
January 18, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engine optimization is self-directed. Unless you’re being managed by another practitioner who tells you what to do and when to do it, SEO can be difficult to plan. These six things can help fill your days with interesting work and deliver natural search value.
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Keyword Research
SEO: Converting Keywords to Link Authority
January 13, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown
Link authority is one of the most critical influencers of how a site ranks. How do keywords increase link authority? They indicate the content you need to create to convince others that your site is worthy of linking to.
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On-page SEO
Improve SEO with ‘Audience Insights’ in Google Ads
January 3, 2019 • Bill Sebald
What if you could use information about your existing customers to obtain new ones? That’s the purpose of Audience Insights in Google Ads. It helps businesses find new prospects based on current customer data.
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Link Building
4 Sales Lessons for SEO Link-building
December 28, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Search engine optimization professionals may think of themselves as marketers but not salespeople. Nonetheless, a good salesperson can teach us at least four lessons related to the SEO process of obtaining backlinks.
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SEO
Most Google Search Results Now Come from Mobile Index
December 21, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
More than 50 percent of Google’s global search results are served from its mobile-first index, according to an announcement from the search giant. The news is important for those who maintain ...
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SEO
SEO in 2019 Is More Than Blue Text Links
December 17, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
The future of search goes beyond blue links on a search results page. In 2019, more results will come in the form of voice response, images, and before the searcher even enters a query.
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SEO
How to Choose Topics for an SEO Cluster Strategy
December 14, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Topic clusters are a strategy for search engine optimization and content marketing. The approach — organizing a site's content around topics and subtopics — can be effective if you choose the right clusters. What follows is a process I've used to create retail topic clusters.
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Technical SEO
6 SEO Myths about Alt Tags
December 10, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Alt tags are a frequent to-do item for search engine optimization. But there's much confusion surrounding the importance of optimizing alt tags. So it’s time for some myth-busting around this oft-misunderstood topic.
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Technical SEO
Use HTML Caching to Increase Page Speed
December 9, 2018 • Hamlet Batista
Heavy traffic to a website can result in performance problems, slower page speed, and fewer conversions. In this article, I'll share a simple process to speed up page loads. The idea is to cache not just images and scripts, but also the HTML content.
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SEO
SEO: Topic Clusters Improve Rankings, Traffic
November 21, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Topic clusters are a search engine optimization strategy meant to improve site architecture, help search engines discover important pages, and improve rankings. Topic clusters work like this.
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Technical SEO
SEO: Why Is Metadata Important?
November 19, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
This article will describe at a high level the types of metadata most commonly used in SEO. Pay careful attention to the terminology. Meta tags are metadata, but not all metadata are meta tags. Some elements commonly called “tags” are actually attributes of a tag.
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SEO Tools
3 Tools to Analyze Content for Marketing, SEO
November 14, 2018 • Armando Roggio
A successful content marketing program often begins with creating and maintaining an inventory of every page on your site. There are several ways to conduct a content inventory. In each case, you begin by getting a list of all of the pages. Here are three of the best tools to generate that list.
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SEO
SEO in 15 Minutes a Day
November 9, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
If search engine optimization is only a fraction of your responsibilities, this article is for you. What would happen to your business if natural search bottomed out tomorrow? Instead, spend 15 minutes a day on improving your site’s SEO.
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Link Building
SEO: 6 Ways to Increase Backlinks
October 26, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
The number of high-quality sites linking to yours is one of the most important organic ranking signals. But obtaining those links is among the most difficult and the most necessary aspects of search engine optimization. Here are six ideas to help.
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Keyword Research
SEO: Driving Content Strategy with Keyword Research
October 19, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Keyword research, the foundation of search engine optimization, also drives content strategy. Searchers want something: information or a product. When we research keyword data, we mine the search engines for information ...
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SEO
SEO: Include Images and Videos in Sitemaps
October 15, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Including image and video content in an XML sitemap may help Google discover more about them to include in image and video search results. XML sitemaps are a convenient way to share page information with search engines such as Google. While submitting a sitemap will not guarantee that a page will be indexed, it will not hurt rankings.
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SEO
4 Steps to Better SEO in 2019
October 7, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Use these four steps to create your search engine optimization strategy for 2019. Start with keyword research. The idea is to understand the market for keywords — what consumers are searching for relating to your offerings and in what volume.
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Technical SEO
SEO: Understanding Sitemaps for Ecommerce Stores
October 3, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Sitemaps inform search engines which pages on a website should be crawled, and may help search engines discover and index those pages. While sitemaps can be a simple text file listing ...
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Technical SEO
Technical SEO: 15 Critical Areas That Impact Performance
September 30, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
The technical aspects of search engine optimization can seem mysterious, especially for content marketers. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The 15 areas below cover the major areas. 15
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Technical SEO
Change Organic Search Snippets to Drive Motivated Buyers
September 28, 2018 • Hamlet Batista
In “How to Increase Click-throughs on Organic Search Listings,” I addressed the importance of compelling messages in organic snippets. In this article, I will dig deeper. I will explore how ...
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Keyword Research
SEO: Use ‘Niche Down’ Keyword Research for Content Ideas
September 25, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Keyword research is one of the most effective search engine optimization practices. It can open the door to compelling content marketing ideas and link building. The so-called “niche down” method of ...
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SEO
SEO: 2 Ways to Collect Competitive Ranking Data
September 23, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Your organic search competitors may not be the sites you think. What matters is who Google and Bing and other search engines think your competition is. They determine which sites rank for individual keywords based on criteria that have little to do with your business model.
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Technical SEO
SEO: Building a 301 Redirect Strategy
September 16, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
When a site’s URLs change, 301 redirects are crucial to preserve and grow natural search performance. Organic search rankings depend in large part on link authority: the quantity and quality of ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Retaining Performance on Site Migrations
September 7, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown
Site migrations are risky for natural search performance. Whether you’re migrating a site to a new design or rebranding, what you do before the new site is live will determine its natural search performance.