SEO Archives

SEO Tips for Local Contractors

June 19, 2013 • Chris Silver Smith

It's summertime and for many people this is a time for home improvement projects. For contractors this also means it's high season for business. For house painters, carpet and flooring installers, roofing companies, electricians, landscapers, swimming pool contractors, siding providers, and general building contractors, this is the time of year when ranking in the top of the search results can mean the difference between substantial revenues or mediocre profits.

Technical SEO

10 Free Website Speed Tests

May 13, 2013 • Sig Ueland

Before your customers enter your ecommerce store, they’re waiting for it to load. Page load time is the lapsed time between the moment a user requests a new page and when that page is fully rendered by the browser. Reducing page load times can reduce bounce rates and increase conversion...

Technical SEO

SEO Audits: What to Expect

March 15, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown

One of the challenges that plagues the search marketing industry is a lack of standards around the quality and scope of work. Different agencies and consultants will use similar words to describe very different deliverables and processes. One of the most abused of these is the SEO Audit...

Technical SEO

SEO: Impact of Ecommerce Catalog Structure

March 1, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown

Information architecture and search engine optimization are both critical aspects of developing an ecommerce site. During the process, early decisions made about the structure of a site and its product catalog can have surprising ramifications for SEO. Which product types and attribute...

Technical SEO

SEO: Optimal Ecommerce URLs

February 1, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown

The ecommerce platform that hosts a site determines the URL structure, which in turn can have an impact on the site’s search engine optimization. Each platform creates URLs according to its own rules, but nearly all can be modified for greater SEO and brand recognition. In years past, ...

SEO

SEO New Year’s Resolutions for 2013

January 4, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown

With a new year ahead, it’s time to think about New Year’s resolutions. What do you want search engine optimization to do for your site in 2013? The most likely goals for any ecommerce site revolve around driving more traffic and converting more visitors. Let’s look at some steps for an...

Technical SEO

SEO: When Product Facets and Filters Fail

December 21, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Ecommerce sites rely on filtered or faceted navigation to make their product catalogs more easily digestible for customers. Depending on how filters and facets are implemented, however, they can either be fantastic for search engine optimization or a big failure. SEO is based on three ...

Technical SEO

SEO: Working Around a Redesign

December 14, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

When a redesign or platform change looms in your site’s future, it’s easy to turn off all search-engine-optimization work and focus on planning the new site. After all, why bother making changes that will just be overwritten when you launch the new site? Focusing on a few key areas will...

SEO

The SEO Benefit of Infographics

December 7, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization professionals don't usually recommend creating more images, but infographics can have a real benefit to SEO. Typically, images are used in place of textual content to convey the same message visually. Consequently, images tend to be viewed as detrimental to SE...

Keyword Research

Using Keyword Research beyond SEO

November 30, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Keyword research is one of the foundational pieces of search engine optimization because it illuminates the exact words real-life customers use to search for the products we sell. But why stop there? The insights that keyword research provides can inform other many other areas of the bu...

Technical SEO

4 Fast Ways to Kill Your SEO

November 9, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization experts usually focus on what you should do to improve your site’s organic search rankings. In this post, I'm asking the opposite question: What are the fastest ways to destroy your site’s SEO performance? Here's a list of my top four mistakes. Mistake 1: Lau...

Keyword Research

Google Analytics: Overcoming ‘Not Provided’ Keywords

November 7, 2012 • Jaime Brugueras

What do you do when 36 percent of your traffic data is gone? For most of us, the answer is “panic.” After all, for an online business, traffic data and search-engine-optimization knowledge is essential. If you don’t understand the behavior of visitors to your website, then your business...

Link Building

SEO: 3 Ways to Grow Links to Your Ecommerce Site

November 2, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization relies in large part on relevant content and authoritative links from other sites. As the search engines develop ever-more stringent algorithms around relevance and authority, it becomes harder to acquire links that will actually matter to your site’s SEO effo...

SEO

Understanding Google’s Algorithm Updates

October 26, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

The term "webspam" refers to low-quality sites that use manipulative search engine optimization strategies to win rankings and traffic. Google’s war on webspam has reached an all-time high, with the search giant churning out an average of one-to-two updates a day. Understanding these al...

Keyword Research

SEO: Marshaling Your Keyword Army

October 12, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Content optimization for search engines seems straightforward. You research the keywords that your customers use most frequently and you use them on your site in the places that matter most to search engine algorithms. But deciding which keywords to apply to individual pages when you’re...

Keyword Research

5 SEO Keyword Research Sources in Google

October 3, 2012 • Chris Silver Smith

Many search marketers are intimidated by the keyword research phase of search engine optimization. They falsely assume that it requires purchasing expensive subscriptions to tools, or hiring experts. However, Google provides a wealth of data that you can leverage if you know where to look. Read on for five fantastic sources of keyword ideas in Google itself.

Technical SEO

SEO: Putting Navigation to Work

September 28, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Navigation does more than shuttling customers around your site. In addition to its obvious usability and design functions, navigation can be optimized to improve organic search traffic. Well-optimized navigation strengthens the flow of link popularity throughout your site while sending ...

Creative SEO backdrop. Search engine optimization and startup concept. 3D Rendering

Technical SEO

Using Meta Tags for Search Engine Visibility

September 25, 2012 • Lorrie Thomas Ross

Search engine optimization continually evolves to include new tactics. But classics like meta tags are still important. Making the most of your meta tags can be a small step that can make a large difference in your overall web marketing.

SEO

SEO Ranking Forecast: 74 and Sunny

September 21, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

One of the hardest aspects of search engine optimization is determining whether changes in your site’s organic search results are based on changes to your own site or external influences like algorithm changes. SEOmoz created MozCast weather report to help answer this question, and tod...

On-page SEO

SEO: Using Automated Landing Pages

September 14, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Marketing automation tools make creating landing pages a snap. They focus on making it more efficient to deliver relevant content to relevant individuals at relevant times via email and paid search campaigns. So why not use them to create landing pages for search engine optimization cam...

Technical SEO

SEO: Avoiding Penguins and Pandas

September 7, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Google’s recent penchant for naming major algorithmic updates after animals has the world of search engine optimization sounding more like a zookeeper’s dilemma. But with rumors of an impending Penguin update — see this article from Search Engine Roundtable — right around the corner, e...

Technical SEO

SEO: Launching a Redesigned Site

August 31, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Editor's Note: This is part two of a two-part series on identifying, assessing, and mitigating the risk of site redesigns on organic search traffic. Part one, "SEO: Identifying the Impact of a Site Redesign," we published last week. Launching a redesigned site is filled with potentiall...

Technical SEO

SEO: Identifying the Impact of a Site Redesign

August 24, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Editor's Note: This is part one of a two-part series on identifying, assessing, and mitigating the risk of site redesigns on organic search traffic. Part two, "Launching a Redesigned Site," we will publish next week. Site redesigns can create a period of intense instability for organi...

Keyword Research

SEO: Using Excel for Keyword Analysis

August 17, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Excel is the SEO tool I use most frequently. Excel helps me organize my thoughts, decide which keywords or pages to focus on, illustrate key concepts, and even draft rudimentary content. This article lists my favorite Excel formulas, menu items, and keyboard shortcuts for search engin...

SEO

4 Simple Visuals to Explain SEO

August 10, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

When talking to marketers, it can be nearly impossible to get them to look beyond the brand imagery and user experience they’ve crafted for their customers online. And while they’re locked into that perception of their sites, it’s very difficult to explain why search engines don’t perce...

Technical SEO

5 SEO Shortcuts to Avoid

July 12, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engines are programmed to reward relevance and popularity, and are striving to algorithmically determine quality as well. Ecommerce sites are programmed to sell product to customers as efficiently as possible while offering a positive brand experience. Ecommerce sites often striv...

Technical SEO

SEO: Understanding XML Sitemaps

June 29, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

XML sitemaps serve a very niche purpose in search engine optimization: facilitating indexation. Posting an XML sitemap is kind of like rolling out the red carpet for search engines and giving them a roadmap of the preferred routes through the site. It’s the site owner’s chance to tell c...

Keyword Research

SEO Keywords: ‘Red Roses’ vs. ‘Roses Red’

June 22, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engines are code-driven, logic-based pieces of software and hardware that know and do what they’re programmed to do: rank data gathered from crawling websites according to specific algorithms against searchers’ queries. Those algorithms based on keyword relevance prefer exact mat...

SEO Tools

12 Free Google SEO Tools

June 13, 2012 • Sig Ueland

Before you spend any money on a search-engine-optimization campaign for your website, take advantage of Google’s free tools to optimize your site and increase its PageRank. And if you are just starting out with SEO, check out Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide PDF. Here ...

SEO

SEO Report Card: MotoGP Store, Part 2

June 7, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

The MotoGP Store volunteered for an SEO Report Card. This is the second installment of my analysis of that site. In "Part 1," I reviewed the home page and category pages, internal navigation, HTML templates, title tags and keyword choices on, again, The MotoGP Store. Now I'll look at UR...