Category

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: eHobbies.com “Uncommonly Sophisticated”

May 11, 2009 • Stephan Spencer

This month eHobbies.com is up for review. Ken Kikkawa, CEO of eHobbies, submitted the site for grading. I have to say I was impressed. Chief executive officers of companies that large - #364 on the Internet Retailer 500 list for eHobbies - are usually too high level to concern themselve...
SEO
SEO: Try Surfing Like a Search Engine Spider

April 15, 2009 • Jill Kocher Brown

I’m a visual learner. I need to see and interact with things to understand them. It therefore helps me to mimic the behavior of search engine spiders when I’m digging into a site for the first time to review its search engine optimization issues. I like to think of it as “being the bot....
SEO
Search Engine Friendly Shopping Carts?

April 2, 2009 • PEC Staff

Practical eCommerce will soon publish our "Shopping Cart Roundup" PDF guide. This guide will offer suggestions for choosing the shopping cart that best fits a merchant's needs. It will also list every shopping cart company that we know of. One question that most all merchants have in e...
SEO
SEO Report Card: Poor SEO Choices Cost Worthy Charity

April 1, 2009 • Stephan Spencer

Although you might not think of nonprofits as having ecommerce sites, they do. They accept donations via secure transactions. Rarely will they have a shopping cart, but nonetheless, nonprofits suffer from a number of the same search engine optimization ills that plague traditional ecomm...
Keyword Research
SEO: Targeting the Longtail for More Sales

March 25, 2009 • Jan Riley

For many small online businesses, especially ecommerce, search-engine, keyword optimization is a once a year process at best. Once you have gone through the laborious and mind numbing process of keyword research, writing title tags, page descriptions and revising your copy, the idea of ...
SEO
Measuring SEO Performance

March 17, 2009 • Jill Kocher Brown

Measuring success in search engine optimization can typically be done in four ways. “Indexation” measurements will determine if a search engine has properly identified all of your site’s pages. “Backlink” measurements will show the number of internal and external links that point to you...
SEO
SEO Report Card: Gosatellite.com

March 5, 2009 • Stephan Spencer

I took a long hiatus from "SEO Report Card" when my capable colleague Jeff Muendel filled-in for me. But now I'm happy to report, “I'm baaaack.” Our lucky contestant this month is Gosatellite.com. Steven Hutt, echannels director with that company, requested this site grade. Home Pa...
Keyword Research
SEO: Estimating Sales Potential from Keywords and Phrases

February 19, 2009 • Jill Kocher Brown

The perception that search engine optimization is a limitless source of free traffic and sales is one reason that SEO campaigns sometimes fail to live up to expectations. Yes, SEO efforts can deliver excellent returns on investment. But how much expected return is realistic? This articl...
SEO
Survey of The Month: SEO is Both Important and Misunderstood

February 9, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce merchants overwhelming said that search engine optimization (SEO) was an active part of their marketing efforts and that they believed it accounted for a significant portion of their web traffic, but many of those same merchants identified black hat SEO tactics, like purchasin...
SEO
Ecommerce Know-How: Information Architecture to Improve SEO and Usability

January 7, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Taking lessons from two marketing disciplines, online retailers and their web designers can build a well structured Internet store organized into themes or categories that will make it easy for shoppers and search engines alike to find important information and product pages. In this ...
SEO
Chart of the Week: SEM/SEO Most Important Marketing Tactic

January 5, 2009 • Armando Roggio

A recent study from SLI Systems asked 319 respondents about the importance of various technologies and tactics in terms of their effect on ecommerce strategy. While the sample for the study was not necessarily large, it tended to support many preconceived ideas about which web technolo...
SEO
Ecommerce Know-How: Bot Herding, A SEO Internal Linking Tactic

December 30, 2008 • Armando Roggio

A relatively simple SEO linking strategy can improve how well and how often your store's product pages are indexed and displayed in organic search engine results. This linking technique goes by several names. Bruce Clay Inc., an Internet business consultancy, refers to it as "siloing."...
Keyword Research
PeC Traffic Report: Use Blog Titles that Reflect Keywords and Content

December 26, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Blog titles play an important role in how search engines index blog posts. Bloggers that want to get the most web traffic possible seed post titles with important keywords and make interesting promises about the content. Many online retailers use blogs to both communicate with consumer...
SEO
PageRank: What Is It? And How Do You Calculate It?

December 19, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Google’s PageRank technology plays an important role in how online stores show up in search results. Understanding how this ranking system works will help ecommerce merchants improve their search engine optimization and potentially increase website traffic. PageRank is a proprie...
Link Building
SEO: Buying Links is Risky Business

December 2, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

Garnering inbound links from websites with good PageRank is a mainstay of search engine optimization. Links are like votes for a given website in the eyes of search engines, and their number and quality have much to do with determining the outcome of search engine results. That’s why ...
Link Building
Find and Measure Links Better with Linkscape

November 7, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

One of the most important attributes of search engine optimization (SEO) is link building, which is garnering quality inbound links to a website. A single link from a high-quality, trusted source can raise the rankings of multiple pages on a website because search engines aren’t just co...
SEO Tools
Boost Sales with Google SEO Tools

September 25, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

As search engines have gotten better at discovering web content in many forms, manually submitting to them has become less of a focus. But content and distribution platforms continue to expand, and as they do so, the need for manual search engine submission remains an important, if chan...
Keyword Research
Keyword Research: Wordpot Rivals KeywordDiscovery, Wordtracker

September 4, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

While website architecture, link building, and template coding all affect search engine optimization, keyword research and placement is perhaps the easiest SEO attribute to implement. It is often the low hanging fruit of an SEO campaign. To that end, a few months ago, I wrote about Goog...
SEO
SEO Report Card: Pinkorpunk.com

April 2, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

I have to admit that both the design and focus of this month's report card recipient stood out from the many requests I receive. The website is not subtle, and it's probably not even pretty in the classical sense, but it's certainly fun. Pinkorpunk.com sells clothing accessories that ha...
SEO
Video: SEO Update

November 8, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

In February 2006, Contributor Stephan Spencer, founder and CEO of search-firm Netconcepts, critiqued the search engine optimization efforts of Discountflies.com, following a request from that company. In this SEO Report Card critique, Spencer issued a C- for an overall SEO grade. In ...
SEO
Video: SEO Website Update

October 29, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

In January 2006, Contributor Stephan Spencer, founder and CEO of search-firm Netconcepts, critiqued the search engine optimization efforts of Balancedlifeproducts.com, following a request from that company. In this SEO Report Card critique, Spencer issued a D+ for an overall SEO grade....
Link Building
SEO Report Card: Link Building Could Improve Strong Site

October 1, 2007 • Jeff Muendel

Candlesandsuch.com is a website run quite frugally by its two main proprietors. For a site that hasn’t had a lot of professional help with regard to search engine optimization, it possesses some positive SEO attributes. That’s not to say there aren’t issues, but some of the main facets ...
SEO
SEO Report Card: Beachaudio.com

September 12, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

Ranked 359 in the Internet Retailer 500, and boasting over 45,000 products in its catalog and 151,000 pages in Google, Beach Audio has a lot of grunt. According to Troy McKinnon, their director of ecommerce, Beach Audio did a complete search engine optimization overhaul using in-house s...
SEO
Search Engine Optimization And Web 2.0

September 6, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

That well-used buzzword "Web 2.0" encompasses a number of technologies, including blogs, RSS feeds, wikis, tagging/folksonomies, podcasts, widgets, AJAX and Flash. Some of these technologies are a net positive for your search engine visibility and some are a net negative.  Blogs and RSS...
SEO
SEO: Heads or (Long) Tails?

August 29, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

Search engine optimizing for the "Long Tail" is fundamentally different from optimizing for the head. Therefore, it’s important to initially point out that the strategies and tactics for “Long Tail” SEO are more automated and extensible than for traditional SEO. What is "Long Tail?" ...
SEO
SEO Report Card: VeganStore.com

August 15, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

Veganstore.com, operated by Pangea Vegan Products, is a site after my own heart. As a recently turned vegetarian (as of a year ago), I'm definitely in the target market. Too bad it's unlikely I would have discovered the site. That's because I'm not strictly vegan, and the site isn't ta...
SEO
SEO Report Card: Republicatrading.com

August 6, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

Founder Rafael Jimenez of NYC-based Latino and multi-ethnic men's streetwear brand Republica Trading Co. volunteered to have his site reviewed. That was a good call because the site misses the mark when it comes to SEO in some key areas. Before even loading the home page, I uncovered...
SEO
SEO: Is Your Site Holiday-ready?

August 1, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

Those of you with school-age children may have been preoccupied with back-to-school, but now it’s time to start preparing your site for the holidays. The holiday shopping season is not that far off, so get on with implementing these traffic-building tips in order to achieve maximum sear...
SEO
SEO: Metrics That Matter

June 17, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

Out with the old, in with the new. In terms of SEO, what’s falling by the wayside? Obsessively watching indexation numbers and rankings on “trophy” keywords (like the one you know the CEO always checks first thing in the morning). Worrying yourself sick over “duplicate content penalt...
SEO
SEO Report Card: Change Home Page Links

June 12, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

This month's selectee, Millcraftfurniture.com, is an outdoor furniture manufacturer operating a small (less than 100 pages) MIVA Merchant-powered ecommerce site. Its rankings are in the doldrums. The store does not appear in the first 100 listings in Google for critical terms "Adirondac...

« Previous 1 2 3 … 20 21 22 23 Next »