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 Report Card: Yarnware.com

September 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

For this SEO Report Card, I’m responding to the Yarnware’s heartfelt plea for a site grade. Meredith Bright of Yarnware writes: “I used to have much better organic search rankings, but they have been dropping recently. I can’t figure out what is wrong.” It wasn’t hard to see why. The si...
SEO
SEO: Harness the Power of CSS

August 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a technology popular with web developers who care about web standards and accessibility. But it should also be a technology embraced by anyone who cares about SEO. It's amazing You can do amazing things with CSS. For example, you can completely eliminat...
SEO
SEO Report Card: KayakFishingStuff.com

August 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

In many ways this site was a breath of fresh air. From an SEO standpoint, Kayak Fishing Stuff is doing a number of things right, and it shows in their No. 1 rankings in Google for “kayak fishing," "fishing kayak” and "fishing kayaks." Of course, there is still room for improvement, but ...
SEO
SEO Report Card: Zearth.Blogspot.com

July 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

Since this month’s article is on blogs and SEO, it makes sense for me to evaluate an etailer’s blog for this month’s SEO Report Card. Zearth.com’s staff operates a blog at Zearth.blogspot.com, although they are relatively new to the concept. They’ve had it up for just a few months. They...
SEO
SEO: Blogging Your Way To The Top

July 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

Search engines, Google in particular, seem to love blogs. This is in part due to the fact that search engines rely heavily on links for their ranking algorithms, and the blogosphere is rich with interlinkages. Bloggers constantly link to each other - through "hat tips," "blogrolls," "tr...
SEO
Black Hat SEO

June 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

Search engine spammers – also known as “black hatters” – never prosper. Sooner or later, they get caught. And when they do, it’s almost never pretty. Consequences can include ranking penalties, removal of the site’s “voting” power (i.e., ability to pass PageRank), incomplete indexation ...
SEO
SEO Report Card: As-Seen-on-TV-Store-1.com

May 30, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

Even though I’ve received dozens of requests for site gradings, this month I’ve decided to pick a site that didn’t ask for it. Why? Because this month I’m going to air some poor, unsuspecting black-hat SEO’s dirty laundry in order that you might learn from their mistakes and indiscretio...
SEO
SEO Report Card: Airtroductions.com

May 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

This month I decided to evaluate a different sort of ecommerce site – not your standard run-of-the-mill online catalog website. AirTroductions is an ecommerce-enabled matchmaking service for road warriors (currently over 11,000 of them) who are looking for someone interesting to sit nex...
Keyword Research
SEO: Optimizing Your Content

May 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

This month, I'd like to build on what I've already covered in past issues regarding keyword research (November 2005 issue) and writing for search engines (December 2005 issue) and integrate them together into a plan for optimizing your site's content. A “SMART” goal is one that is spec...
SEO
SEO Report Card: Golfgods.com

April 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

This time around we're going to be taking a slightly different tack, as I was privy to a redesign in-the-making–of golf equipment seller Golfgods.com – with numerous SEO and usability improvements, along with a shift in ecommerce platforms. In fact, by the time this article ends up in p...
Link Building
SEO: Tools for Link Building

April 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

In last month's issue, I discussed links and their importance in search engine optimization. Now let's get acquainted with some powerful tools to aide us in our link building efforts. Yahoo! Site Explorer offers a quick way to review competitors' and your own inbound links. PageRank Se...
SEO
SEO Report Card: Stayleaner.com

March 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

Each month it gets harder to select an ecommerce site to assess, as the requests from readers keep coming in increasing volume. This month I've chosen Stayleaner.com, the ecommerce site for J & J Health Foods, which sells vitamins, herbs and supplements for sports nutrition and body...
Link Building
SEO: Weaving a Web of Links

March 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

Links are the currency of the web. Not only do their drive traffic in their own right, but they also are essential to high search engine rankings. Without good inbound links to your web site, your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts won't get off the ground. Link building isn't ab...
Technical SEO
Optimize Your HTML For Search Engines

February 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

SEO can be broken into two distinct areas – "onpage" factors and "off-page" factors. On-page factors include anything that you can affect on the page itself, such as the title tag, body copy, H1 heading tags, image “alt” attributes, etc. Off-page factors encompass things that influence...
SEO
SEO Report Card: Discountflies.com

February 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

Welcome back to another installment of “SEO Report Card.” Each month I assess the search engine optimization effectiveness of an ecommerce site. This month's brave volunteer is DiscountFlies.com, an online retailer who sells flies for fly fishing and uses the MIVA Merchant platform. Di...
SEO
Search Engine Optimization: Avoid Complex URLs

January 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

Search engines tend to have problems fully indexing dynamic websites (in other words, sites that are hooked up to a database of content). The kinds of sites that search engines have the biggest trouble with are ones that have overly complex URL structures, including numerous variables ...
SEO
SEO Report Card: Balancedlifeproducts.com

January 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

Welcome to “SEO Report Card”, where I assess how well search engine optimized a selected ecommerce site is. For this first installment, our guinea pig is BalancedLifeProducts.com, a small ecommerce site, based in Madison, Wisconsin, that sells meditation and massage products such as yog...
SEO
Search Engine Optimization: Writing Effectively

December 1, 2005 • Stephan Spencer

In order to achieve maximum search engine visibility, you need to think a bit like a search engine when writing the copy for your website. Search engines look at the HTML code that makes up your web page and attempts to parse out the textual copy on the page, eliminating the HTML markup...
Keyword Research
Keyword Sleuthing: Locate the Right Word

November 1, 2005 • Stephan Spencer

Effective search engine optimization (“SEO”) starts with keyword research. Chasing after the wrong keywords is a waste, costing you the time and effort you have put into search engine optimization. The "right" keywords are the ones that are not only relevant to your business, but are al...