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-
SEO Tools
How to Perform a Local, Competitive SEO Analysis
October 19, 2016 • Bill Hartzer
Businesses that rely on local consumers should periodically examine the search engine optimization efforts of their competitors. You’ll see what they’re doing — what you like and dislike — and ...
-
Technical SEO
SEO: Accelerated Mobile Pages for Ecommerce
October 14, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages protocol makes mobile sites faster. Faster sites typically see lower bounce rates, higher time-on-site numbers, and higher conversion rates. AMP also benefits natural search performance. Smartphone users want speed.
-
Technical SEO
SEO: Reclaiming Links to Deleted Pages
October 2, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
When pages on your site go away, their link authority is wasted. But you can harvest that precious link authority and redirect it to other pages on your site, those ...
-
Technical SEO
Google Penguin Now Part of Core Search Algorithm
September 24, 2016 • Bill Hartzer
Google just announced that its Penguin algorithm is now a part of its core algorithm, updated in real time. Google last updated Penguin a few years ago. Updating Penguin continuously will likely affect many businesses. Recall that Google Penguin monitors ...
-
SEO
SEO: Google’s Algorithm Hasn’t Changed, or Has It?
September 23, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
September has been a big month for unofficial Google algorithm changes. Business owners are seeing significant movement in both Google’s core search results and “local pack” search results, though Google ...
-
Keyword Research
SEO: Google Limits Keyword Data to Advertisers Only
September 16, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
Keywords and topics are central to contextual relevance, a primary ranking factor for search engines. In the wake of the changes to Google’s Keyword Planner, the natural search industry’s go-to ...
-
Technical SEO
SEO: Simplifying Navigation Cuts Performance
September 9, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
The trend toward simplicity in web design is affecting navigation. The impact on search engine optimization of navigation changes can be staggering. Navigation isn’t just a way for shoppers to navigate.
-
On-page SEO
SEO: Google’s Mobile Update to Impact Interstitials, Pop-ups
September 2, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
Google will update its mobile-friendly search algorithm in January 2017 to make smartphone content visibility a ranking signal. Sites that display “intrusive interstitials” — pop-up boxes, mainly — that impact ...
-
SEO
SEO: Why Your Long Tail Isn’t Long
August 19, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
The long tail of natural search should drive more traffic and sales than the head. Unfortunately, a site’s strategy, architecture, and implementation often cut the long tail short of its full ...
-
Keyword Research
SEO: How to Maximize the Long Tail
August 12, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
Ecommerce sites are naturally suited to target the long tail of organic search performance. How you optimize your site determines how long its tail could be. The long tail of search ...
-
On-page SEO
SEO: Every Page Is an Entry Page
August 5, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
Every page of your site is an entry page for natural search. Are all of your pages ready to welcome searchers? All shoppers want something. They may not want to buy ...
-
Link Building
SEO: Content Is King but Links Are Gold
July 22, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
Creating compelling, customer-centric content isn’t enough to win rankings and shoppers. Without a strong internal linking structure, even the best content will still fail to perform in natural search. The three ...
-
Technical SEO
The Real Benefit of Accelerated Mobile Pages
July 10, 2016 • Armando Roggio
The Accelerated Mobile Pages project’s restrictive subset of HTML tags, CSS, and JavaScript encourages web developers and designers to employ practices that may improve the mobile web experience. Contributor Jill Kocher ...
-
Technical SEO
3 Server Errors That Drain SEO
July 8, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
Servers are the foundation of the web, but their archaic status codes have a big impact on search engine optimization that few marketers understand well enough. Three types of server ...
-
SEO
5 Reasons Why SEO Has a Bad Reputation
June 20, 2016 • Armando Roggio
If you start to type “seo is” into Google, the king of search engines is likely to autosuggest that “seo is dead” or that “seo is bullsh**,” leaving you to ...
-
Link Building
How Link-building for SEO Fits with Content Marketing
May 30, 2016 • Armando Roggio
The terms “content marketing” and “link building” describe discrete marketing activities with distinct scope, strategies, and purposes. They are not the same thing. But that does not mean you cannot ...
-
SEO
How to Write Traffic-generating Meta Descriptions, for Ecommerce
May 20, 2016 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce meta descriptions can act like short, tweet-length ads capable of attracting visitors from social media and beating higher-ranked competitors on search engine results pages. HTML meta tags include information about ...
-
On-page SEO
Ecommerce Page Titles Key for Shoppers (and SEO)
May 10, 2016 • Armando Roggio
A thoughtful, descriptive ecommerce page title can help attract interested shoppers from social media and search engines. Page title optimization, if you will, is a low-effort, high-value task for ecommerce site ...
-
SEO Tools
SEO: 22 Tools, Tutorials for Bing
April 24, 2016 • Sig Ueland
If all of your search marketing efforts are on Google, you could be missing out on Bing. It accounts for roughly 20 percent of all U.S. desktop searches, according to ...
-
Technical SEO
SEO: How Search Engines Work
March 27, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engines trawl the web, sifting through billions of data points to serve up information in a fraction of a second. The access to instant information we’ve come to take ...
-
SEO
SEO: Getting More vs. Losing Ground
March 11, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
Every company needs more of something. Maybe your company’s goals focus on more customers. Or maybe it’s more conversions. Whether it’s more sales, more leads, more registrations, more items sold ...
-
SEO Tools
26 Free SEO Tools for Merchants
March 6, 2016 • Sig Ueland
To optimize your website for search engines, you need a variety of tools to monitor performance and discover opportunities. Fortunately, many of those tools are free. Here is a list of ...
-
Technical SEO
SEO: AMP for Ecommerce
February 26, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
News on the mobile web is now four times faster, thanks to Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages. AMP, as the project is known, is targeted at Google mobile searchers looking for long-form ...
-
SEO Tools
For SEO Time Travel, Use Wayback Machine
February 21, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
Which pages your site promotes as the most important is critical for search engine optimization. Remembering the details of past internal linking structures is impossible, unless you use the Wayback Machine ...
-
On-page SEO
Blogs: Starting Point for Effective Communication
February 19, 2016 • Bill Hartzer
Recently, I wrote about four content ideas to help improve your local SEO, one of which dealt with adding a blog to your website. After the article had published, a question came from a reader about whether or not Facebook counts as a blog.
-
SEO
SEO: Continuous Improvement vs. 1-time Campaigns
February 12, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
With pressure to support a business’s overall marketing initiatives, it’s easy to lose sight of the actions needed to improve organic search performance. Most of the marketing team in an ecommerce company is ...
-
Keyword Research
SEO: Using Keyword Research to Better Your Business
February 5, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
Which products and attributes do your shoppers want most? How could your navigation help consumers find what they want faster? What content areas should you focus on? Where should you ...
-
SEO
For SEO Success, Build into Core of Company
January 29, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engine optimization isn’t a project you can do once. For lasting success, SEO needs to be built into the core of how you manage your ecommerce business. Fifteen years ago ...
-
Technical SEO
SEO: 9 Reasons to Crawl Your Ecommerce Site
January 22, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
Every search marketing professional should have a crawler in her arsenal of tools. Organic search’s first and most important rule is that search engines must be able to crawl to a ...
-
SEO
404 Error Pages Serve 2 Purposes: SEO and User Satisfaction
January 15, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
Friendly 404 error pages have two basic components: the 404 server header status required to manage indexation on search engines and the friendly design required to protect the user’s experience ...