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
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...
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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...
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SEO
SEO Sidecars More Trouble than They’re Worth
September 30, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown
I'll get right to the point. You can't bolt a couple of pages onto the edge of your ecommece site like a sidecar to a motorcycle and call it search engine optimization. Or, rather, you can launch your SEO sidecar but it won't achieve the organic search performance you desire without app...
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Keyword Research
SEO: Automating Keyword Selection with AdWords API
August 23, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown
Optimizing a website around highly searched keyword terms can materially increase traffic from search engines. But identifying those keywords takes time. Few SEO managers relish the tedium of slogging through thousands of keyword variations — as critical as that process is to a search-e...
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SEO
How to Check Your Website’s SEO Health
June 27, 2011 • Stephan Spencer
There’s no reason, really, why ecommerce merchants cannot improve the search engine visibility of their websites. That’s because there are many free tools to gauge the search-engine-optimization health of those sites, and suggest SEO corrections to them. In this screencast below, I’ll...
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SEO
Search Engines Love Blogs; 3 Benefits
May 12, 2011 • Stephan Spencer
Search engines love blogs. They provide original, updated content that contribute to highly ranked sites. But how do merchants optimize blogs for search engines and how do they incorporate the blogs into their ecommerce sites? I'll discuss optimizing blogs for search engine performance ...
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Technical SEO
How to Increase Page Speed and Help Search-Engine Rankings
May 11, 2011 • Michael Stearns
In the spring of 2010, Google announced it would factor page speed more heavily into its search ranking algorithm. "Faster sites create happy users," Google stated in the blog post describing the algorithm change. Your ability — as an ecommerce merchant — to improve your site's speed d...
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SEO
SEO Case Study: When Past SEO Efforts Hurt Today’s Traffic
April 15, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown
Editor’s Note: This is the third installment of a search-engine-optimization case study from contributor Jill Kocher on the SEO struggles of The Motor Bookstore, a retailer of automotive manuals. The Motorbook ...
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Technical SEO
SEO Case Study: Improving the Site’s Architecture
March 25, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown
Editor's Note: This is the second installment of a search-engine-optimization case study from contributor Jill Kocher on the SEO travails of The Motor Bookstore, a retailer of automotive manuals. Like most ecommerce businesses, The Motorbook Store relies heavily on traffic from search ...
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SEO
SEO Case Study: One Store’s Struggle with Google Updates
March 17, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown
In an effort to increase the quality of its search results, Google launched an update in late February dubbed the “Farmer/Panda Update” by the search-engine-optimization industry. The update affected 12 percent of Google’s results, decreasing organic traffic for sites like the one owned...
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SEO
Google’s ‘Farmer’ Algorithm and What It Means for Ecommerce SEO
March 8, 2011 • Armando Roggio
A massive change to Google's search engine ranking algorithm has recently improved query results, while having a negative effect on businesses that had been "gaming" the system or reusing others' content. The so-called "Farmer" algorithm update went into effect in late February and aff...
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SEO
How to Waste Time on SEO Activities
March 4, 2011 • Stephan Spencer
As a general rule, search engine optimization consultants are activity-focused. They typically suggest a huge laundry list of various activities to perform. Perhaps the list is prioritized, but nonetheless it is frequently chock full of action items. Unfortunately, many of these activit...
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SEO
J.C. Penney Incurs Google SEO ‘Action’; How to Protect Your Own Company
February 15, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search-engine-optimization agencies often play a vital role in ecommerce sites, where winning and converting organic searches to sales directly impacts the e-tailer’s bottom line. But how far should a company trust an SEO agency to act on its behalf? The SEO community erupted this weeke...
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SEO
SEO Consequences of Negative Reviews
November 30, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown
An alarming new flavor of search engine optimization surfaced on Friday when The New York Times reported on DecorMyEyes, an unscrupulous eyewear etailer who goads customers into writing negative reviews for SEO benefit. Nothing boosts a well-crawled site’s rankings higher than an infusi...
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SEO
SEO Report Card: 877MyJuicer.com
November 17, 2010 • Stephan Spencer
Andrew Casey, founder and CEO of 877MyJuicer.com, asked for an "SEO Report Card" for his site. As always, I’m happy to oblige. Andrew started this business in 2004 by selling juicers on eBay. Over the past 6 years, he has grown his startup into a million dollar company with its own e...
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Keyword Research
Supercharge Your Opera, Firefox Web Searches with Search-Preference Keywords
November 5, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Every major web browser allows users to conduct a web search directly from its address bar. But Opera and Firefox take this convenient shortcut a step further, allowing folks to search several different sites or engines directly from a single spot. For professionals who work on the Int...
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Link Building
Bing Social Search: Are ‘Likes’ the New Links?
October 28, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown
Organic search revolves increasingly around personalization, delivering relevance not just to a searcher’s literal query, but also to the implied intent, geographic location, and historical preferences. Earlier this month Bing took another step toward integrating Facebook’s social dat...
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SEO
Ask an Expert: Subdomains, Subdirectories and SEO Implications
October 20, 2010 • PEC Staff
"Ask an Expert" is an occasional feature where we ask ecommerce experts questions from online merchants. For this installment, we address a series of questions on the proper use of subdomains. For the answers, we turn to Michael Stearns, CEO of the Internet marketing and design company...
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On-page SEO
Shopping Cart FAQ: How to Evaluate SEO Effectiveness
October 14, 2010 • Jon Hos
Editor's Note: We are excited to debut "Shopping Cart FAQ," our monthly column aimed at merchants who are evaluating shopping carts. Merchants frequently have different priorities for their carts. Some may seek specialized merchandizing features, others may seek customized shipping inte...
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SEO
SEO Report Card: AxisLabs.net
October 4, 2010 • Stephan Spencer
In this month's “SEO Report Card,” I'll look at the website for Axis Labs, a company that produces and sells nutritional supplements. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado, this private company went international in 2006 and now distributes to six of the seven continents. Axis Labs curren...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Understanding Advanced Search Operators
September 30, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown
Let’s face it, the engines control search. They may keep tight-lipped control of their algorithmic secrets, but they also provide their users with tools that SEO practitioners can use to understand how the engines see their sites. These advanced operators offer a peek behind the curtain...
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Link Building
SEO: 5 Ecommerce Link-Building Ideas
September 24, 2010 • Bill Hartzer
To obtain good organic rankings in the search engines, web pages need inbound links. This is because search engines look for some way to determine how to rank one page over another. They look for some sort of indication of quality, some sort of "approval" that one ecommerce product page...
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SEO
Google Instant: 9 Frequently Asked Questions
September 21, 2010 • PEC Staff
Roughly half of the visitors to an ecommerce site come from search engines, typically. And when those search engines change the method in which consumers search for online products, the effect on ecommerce merchants can be dramatic. Enter Google Instant, the new auto-fill search proces...
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SEO
Google ‘Instant’ a Game Changer?
September 17, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown
Last week, Google introduced "Instant," a feature that predicts searchers’ queries as they type them and streams the results for that predicted query onto the results page in real time. Google announced Instant on its blog, at "Search: now faster than the speed of type." Google Instan...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Unique Content Good for Search Engines, Good for Consumers
September 3, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown
Unique, valuable content is a critical part of a successful SEO strategy. That is especially the case for ecommerce sites that utilize non-unique stock product descriptions from the manufacturer’s database. But, I’m often asked if there’s a faster, cheaper, free way to generate content....
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Link Building
Ask an Expert: Do No-Follow Links Help with SEO?
August 16, 2010 • PEC Staff
"Ask an Expert" is an occasional feature where we ask ecommerce experts questions from online merchants. For this installment, we address a question about the search-engine-optimization value to no-follow links on social bookmarking sites, such as Digg and StumbleUpon. The question come...
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SEO
SEO for Anti-SEO Business Models
July 29, 2010 • Jill Kocher Brown
I recently changed SEO jobs. I went from an agency that manages clients' search-engine-optimization efforts, to an in-house SEO manager for a single company. I knew previously, from working with many ecommerce clients, that business models and product offerings have an impact on SEO suc...
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Technical SEO
The PEC Review: Online Image Optimizer Speeds Load Times
July 26, 2010 • Armando Roggio
A slow-loading retail site is akin to the store clerk who ignores you in a brick-and-mortar shop. On a recent trip, I stopped at a small antique store. My wife and I entered the store, walked around for about 20 minutes, examined dozens of items, and never once during the entire experi...
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SEO
SEO Report Card: Woot.com
July 23, 2010 • Stephan Spencer
For this month’s “SEO Report Card,” I thought I would do something different and review a site that didn’t request it. The site I chose, Woot.com, is near and dear ...
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Keyword Research
SEO: Keyword Research and Analysis
June 22, 2010 • Bill Hartzer
Editor’s Note: is a contributor to Practical eCommerce and the owner of BillHartzer.com, a Dallas-based online marketing firm. Hartzer wrote the article, below, which first appeared in that company’s blog. Keyword research is one of the most important parts of online marketing. Somet...