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-
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...
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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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...
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Link Building
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 ...
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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SEO
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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 ...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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...
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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 ...
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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...