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

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 ...
SEO
SEO: How Google PageRank Works on an Ecommerce Site

November 6, 2015 • Jill Kocher Brown

Larry Page and Sergey Brin revolutionized the web and the ability to drive ecommerce with a citation-based algorithm called PageRank. Based on the concept of scientific citations as a method ...
SEO > Merchant Voice
Is search engine optimization worth the effort?

October 30, 2015 • Richard Stubbings

Is search engine optimization a dying trade? Just because there are a large number of firms offering to do the work, is there really a need for it? Whilst there ...
SEO
SEO: New Google My Business App Makes Local Search Easier

September 14, 2015 • Jill Kocher Brown

For companies with physical locations and ecommerce sites, driving customers into physical stores can be just as important as selling online. Organic search can be a powerful channel for both. Google just ...
Technical SEO
SEO: Metadata Can Optimize Search Results

September 6, 2015 • Jill Kocher Brown

Marketers tend to find metadata annoying, like tiny gnats that you’d rather just swat away. Maybe you don’t know where they come from; maybe you don’t know what purpose they serve. But metadata and structured data
SEO
SEO: Rankings Don’t Indicate Performance

August 28, 2015 • Jill Kocher Brown

Owners and managers are obsessed with rankings. They search on Google for something, they see an immediate result, and they make assumptions on their search engine optimization program’s performance.
Technical SEO
SEO: Using Metadata to Drive Traffic

August 23, 2015 • Jill Kocher Brown

Metadata can do amazing things for search engine optimization — from removing duplicate content to promoting your site within the search engines. This is my second post on using metadata to improve your site's search engine ranking.
Technical SEO
Panda 4.2 Complicates SEO for Ecommerce Sites

August 7, 2015 • Jill Kocher Brown

Google released Panda 4.2, the latest Panda algorithm update, in mid-July. If you didn’t feel an impact on your site’s performance on July 18, you’re not alone. Panda 4.2 is Google’s latest algorithm update
On-page SEO
SEO Review: Hi-Health’s Local Search Mostly Good

July 31, 2015 • Jill Kocher Brown

Hi-Health is a retailer of nutritional products in Phoenix, Ariz. It operates roughly 40 brick-and-mortar stores and a robust ecommerce site. Hi-Health volunteered for SEO reviews of both: local search and ecommerce.
On-page SEO
SEO Review: Hi-Health.com Good; Could Be Better

July 24, 2015 • Jill Kocher Brown

Every so often an ecommerce business is brave enough to raise its hand for a public review of its search engine optimization performance. Hi-Health, a retailer of nutritional products, is today’s brave business. Hi-Health is doubly interesting