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
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 ...
SEO Tools
6 Free Android Apps for SEO

January 8, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown

Put your Android phone to work for search engine optimization. These free Android apps will help you monitor your SEO performance and add critical insights in meetings, when you’re away ...
SEO
SEO: Prepare Now for 2016 Holiday

December 27, 2015 • Jill Kocher Brown

Analyze 2015’s holiday search marketing performance before you do anything in 2016. Search engine optimization attempts to improve past organic search performance. You must know how your site performed this year ...
On-page SEO
SEO: Which Pages to Optimize First?

December 18, 2015 • Jill Kocher Brown

Deciding which pages to optimize for search engines can so paralyze marketers that they sometimes end up optimizing nothing. To optimize a page, edit the text that search engines place the most priority on:
Technical SEO
SEO: Do You Need More Than One Domain Name?

December 17, 2015 • Bill Hartzer

I recently spoke with a business owner who had purchased every possible version of his company’s domain name (including the "typos”) to protect his brand.
SEO
9 ‘Naughty or Nice’ SEO Practices

December 11, 2015 • Jill Kocher Brown

The holidays are upon us and the opportunity to make large-scale organic search performance changes is for the most part past. As my kids talk about Santa’s visit and who has been ...
SEO
SEO: The Value of Deep Integration

November 27, 2015 • Jill Kocher Brown

It’s the season that makes or breaks many retailers’ annual revenue expectations. At the end of November, most sites have frozen their code bases and marketers are watching their digital ...
SEO > Merchant Voice
Is Google the right search engine to optimize for?

November 25, 2015 • Richard Stubbings

In my previous post — “Is search engine optimization worth the effort?” — some readers questioned what I wrote. But no one picked up on my first assumption, that Google, being ...
Keyword Research
SEO: The Best URLs Contain Keywords

November 20, 2015 • Jill Kocher Brown

Most ecommerce sites that perform well in organic search have jumped on the keyword URL bandwagon. Optimizing URLs to contain keywords is good for search engine optimization and also helps ...