SEO Archives

17 Tools to Analyze Your Links

June 6, 2012 • Sig Ueland

Monitoring your inbound links is a great way to gauge the progress of your website. Inbound links, or backlinks, give you a picture of who is taking an interest in your site. Compare your inbound links to those of your competing websites, and discover new relationships to build. Here ...

SEO

SEO Report Card: MotoGP Store, Part 1

June 1, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Every now and then an ecommerce site raises its hand for an "SEO Report Card." It’s a great way for the site to get some free advice and a good link, and an interesting way to give Practical eCommerce some, well, practical tips on how we’d handle SEO challenges with real ecommerce sites...

SEO

Why Does SEO Take So Long?

May 25, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search marketing’s two halves are so similar and yet so different. A new pay-per-click advertising campaign can be set up and pushed live, and data starts to roll in that same day. Within a week there may be enough data to analyze performance, tweak and iterate the optimization of the c...

Technical SEO

SEO Site Migration Checklist

May 18, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Migrating a site to a new platform or domain, or implementing a major redesign, is one of the most stressful situations in search engine optimization. The potential for massively impacting organic search traffic and sales is higher during these launches than at any other time. But with ...

Keyword Research

SEO: How to Amplify Keyword Signals

May 11, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization is all about "signal" and "amplification." The signal is simply using relevant keywords. Amplification is about how to use those keywords and encourage linking and sharing. Think of the keywords as the voice of a site and the amplification as a megaphone. The ...

SEO

SEO Professionals Can Harm an Ecommerce Business

May 4, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Like Bon Jovi’s song, “You Give Love a Bad Name,” some search engine optimization companies give that profession a bad reputation. Practical eCommerce recently fielded a question from a reader wondering why his site was being penalized for work his SEO company had done on his behalf. It...

Technical SEO

Google’s Over-Optimization Penalty an Evolution, Not Revolution

April 27, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Google’s much discussed over-optimization penalty turned out to be a moderate evolutionary step in Google’s site quality crusade. Launched April 24, Google wrote in a blog post of its update, “The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s quality gui...

Link Building

SEO: Avoid Link Building Shortcuts

April 19, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

There are no safe link building shortcuts. Instead I want to warn marketers about deceptive search marketers and the dangers of using “easy” link building tactics. In the latest instance, the search engine optimization community is abuzz with news that Home Depot’s SEO team has attempt...

Link Building

SEO: Build Relationships, Not Links

April 13, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

When the Internet was new, it was difficult to find interesting and relevant websites. Link building was easy in those days. It was often just a matter of letting webmasters know that your site existed and they could link to it. Things have changed in the last couple of decades. Webmas...

SEO > Merchant Voice

SEO and Selecting a Magento Theme

April 7, 2012 • Richard Stubbings

One of the best ways to implement any cart is to select a template that is close to what you want your site to look like, and then use a professional designer to tailor it to your unique needs. Magento has literally thousands of templates and it can be a little daunting finding one for ...

SEO

SEO and PPC: Synergistic or Cannibalistic?

April 6, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Many ecommerce managers wonder whether the paid search ads they place enhance or cannibalize the organic search results. They wonder, in other words, if they end up paying for clicks they could have had for free organically. A recent study by Google suggests that the relationship betwee...

On-page SEO

8 SEO Pointers for Ecommerce Product Pages

April 5, 2012 • Pablo Palatnik

Search engine optimization can be the difference between ecommerce businesses that thrive, and those that don't. Optimizing product pages for search engines is especially important. Below are eight pointers to make sure your product pages are properly optimized. 1. Place Keywords i...

Technical SEO

Google’s Secure Search Squeezes SEO Planning and Reporting

March 30, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Google's secure SSL search protects users' search results and the keywords they searched on. Unfortunately, it also poses a growing threat to data-driven search engine optimization. Firefox recently joined Google Chrome — and Google.com, for logged-in users — in defaulting to secure sea...

Technical SEO

Google Plans SEO Over-Optimization Penalty

March 22, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Google’s head spam cop Matt Cutts announced the impending launch of a new over-optimization penalty to “level the playing ground.” The disclosure came earlier this month at the South By ...

SEO Tools

Top 5 Reasons to Use Google Webmaster Tools

March 16, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

There’s a common misconception that registering with Google Webmaster Tools somehow enables Google more access to information about a site. In fact, just the opposite is true. Google Webmaster Tools provides site owners access to data available from no other source, data every ecommerce...

SEO

SEO for Mobile Apps and App Stores

March 9, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

The world of mobile applications is foreign territory to most Internet marketers. App development requires different skills than traditional website development. App planning and design forces marketers to understand the limitations of different platforms and devices. But once an app i...

Technical SEO

SEO Benefits of Responsive Web Design

March 1, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Site owners have many competing needs when developing mobile sites. Different devices, different capabilities, different screen sizes and resolutions, all have an impact on designing and developing mobile sites today. According to Mongoose Metrics, a tracking and analysis firm, only 9...

SEO

BloomReach to Change SEO Technology?

February 24, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization, boiled down, is the process of making sure a web page ends up highly ranked on search results, for searches relevant to that page. A merchant selling "Columbia Traverse Men's Hiking Shoes," for example, will want to optimize its product page so that searches ...

On-page SEO

SEO: Optimizing Ratings, Reviews and Comments

February 17, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Content that consumers leave on an ecommerce site can improve the site’s search engine optimization, if the platforms and underlying code are set up optimally. Ratings, reviews and comments each play a part in SEO, utilizing the words and opinions that real shoppers voice to strengthen ...

SEO

SEO Impact of Google’s Search Plus Your World

February 3, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

As search and social become ever more entwined in Google’s and Bing’s algorithms and search results, search engine optimizers cannot afford to turn a blind eye to social media. Bing incorporates Facebook data into its search results. Google has taken another big step with the introducti...

Keyword Research

Optimizing a Page for Search Engines, Part 3: Keywords to Content

January 27, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Editor's Note: This is the final installment of a three-part series on optimizing ecommerce pages for search engines. The first two installments, "Part 1: Keyword Research" and “Part 2: Keyword Mapping,” we published previously. I discussed keyword research and content mapping in detai...

SEO

Too Much SEO Can Harm an Ecommerce Business

January 26, 2012 • Kerry Murdock

Balancing SEO with usability was the topic when we recently spoke with Hamlet Batista. He is a pioneering SEO innovator and the founder of Hamlet Batista Group, an SEO consultancy.

Keyword Research

Optimizing a Page for Search Engines, Part 2: Keyword Mapping

January 20, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Editor's Note: This is the second installment of a three-part series on optimizing ecommerce pages for search engines. The first installment, "Part 1: Keyword Research," we published last week. "Part 3: Keywords to Content" we published after the article, below. Keyword research is ess...

Keyword Research

Optimizing a Page for Search Engines, Part 1: Keyword Research

January 13, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Editor’s Note: This is the first installment of a three-part series on optimizing ecommerce pages for search engines. “Part 2: Keyword Mapping” and “Part 3: Keywords to Content” we published ...

SEO

How to Benefit from Googlebot-Mobile’s New Smarts

December 16, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Google’s mobile crawler Googlebot-Mobile has traditionally focused on content designed for feature phones and their extremely limited browsers. Google recently announced, however, a new version of Googlebot-Mobile that crawls using an iPhone user agent, enabling it to discover content d...

SEO

Managing SEO and Social Media Together

December 13, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

How etailers manage their social media marketing channel has a growing impact on organic search results. Google and Bing have both incorporated social data into their algorithms to signal content freshness and quality. While the datasets each engine has access to differ, the fact remain...

SEO Tools

5 Conversion Tools for SEO and Beyond

November 29, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

The quickest path to earning more from an ecommerce site's organic search traffic is to convert more consumers who already go there. I addressed that topic previously, at "SEO: Convert More Before Driving More." Many SEO strategies focus on driving more visitors. But what use is driv...

Technical SEO

SEO: Letting Customers Generate Long Tail Search Terms

November 23, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization typically focuses on the trophy terms, the high-volume keyword phrases, because marketers need to drive the highest value with the lowest effort. Unfortunately, those juicy trophy terms are great for brand recognition and customers' initial awareness, but they...

Technical SEO

Navigation: Your Biggest On-Site SEO Asset

October 28, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

A site's navigational links can help its search engine optimization. Links pass "link popularity," little votes of value, from the linking page to the destination page. In addition, the link's anchor text — the visible text portion of the link — passes a relevance signal. Relevance and...

SEO

SEO Report Card: SolsticeSupply.com, Part 2

October 7, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Over two years ago, we published an "SEO Report Card" for SolsticeSupply.com, an ecommerce site dedicated to closeout winter goods ranging from skis and snowboards to winter apparel. With a final grade of D+, the review didn't go well for founder Justin Clapick, who requested it. Clapic...