SEO Archives

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...

SEO

Critique Part Three: Search Engine Optimization

June 4, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

The Problem: Long, complex URLs create search engine indexing issues. The Fix: Rewrite the URLs to eliminate "stop characters" from the URLs. You might wonder, "why bother?" when the dynamic pages are clearly getting indexed. Even so, studies undertaken by my company, Netconcepts, sho...

SEO

SEO Report Card: Error Pages Create Big Issues

May 14, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

Modernmini sells modern-style babies' and children's furniture, toys, bedding and more. Its site is powered by the Zoovy platform. Founder Pazit Kagel, a designer and mother of three, requested a site grade, and I'm happy to oblige. The URLs contain session IDs — a no-no for SEO — bu...

Link Building

SEO: Link Baiting Tips To ‘Juice’ Your Site

May 7, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

Link bait, simply put, is content that is so funny, so interesting, so useful, or otherwise remarkable that it becomes irresistible to bloggers and website owners, who set up links from their pages to the original material. I've seen link bait take the form of Top 10 lists, humorous vid...

SEO

SEO Report Card: Need Pages At Product Level

May 2, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

One site review request really stood out in this month's batch. Kyle Kano is the owner and operator of The Honey Jar, and he is just 17 years old. Kyle got the idea for his online business when, on a family trip to Colorado, he noticed a shop selling Honeyville Honey — a product made lo...

SEO

SEO: Google Cracks Open Its Black Box

April 16, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

Wouldn't it be great if Google offered insight into how your website stacks up against its super-secret algorithms? What ails your site when it comes to SEO and what could be done better? Google Webmaster Central does just that, by offering a plethora of diagnostic and statistical tools...

SEO

SEO Report Card: The Google Death Sentence

April 4, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

Seasonal online businesses, Gifts By Delivery, have it tough. During most of the year, they live lean while sales slow to a trickle. Then autumn comes and the manna begins to rain down from heaven. For Gifts By Delivery, the ramp-up begins in early October. The fourth quarter last ye...

SEO

SEO: The Duplicate Content Penalty

March 20, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

The question of Google's supposed "duplicate content penalty" seems to be on everybody's minds these days. This issue is particularly relevant for dynamic ecommerce websites, as they often have multiple URLs that lead to the same product content (or nearly the same, with only a variatio...

SEO

SEO Report Card: Escaping the Google Sandbox

February 19, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

New sites are always at a disadvantage when it comes to ranking well in Google, particularly when the domain name is new, too. This phenomenon, known by some as the "Google Sandbox" and by others as the "TrustBox," is not a myth. It is very real and very much an issue for the subject of...

SEO

Jonathan Hochman: Wikipedia and SEO

February 15, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

Stephan Spencer, senior contributor for Practical eCommerce and author of the popular SEO Report Card for the magazine, talks with SEO specialist Jonathan Hochman about the value of Wikipedia, using ...

SEO

SEO: Can Wikipedia Help Your Business?

February 12, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

In Google, Wikipedia is everywhere. Pretty much anything you type into Google seems to result in a Wikipedia entry being returned as a top-10 result. Wikipedia's status in the search engines as an "authority site" is undisputed. Those lucky, well-connected, skillful or famous enough to ...

SEO

SEO: To Buy Links, or Not to Buy Links?

January 10, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

If Google engineer Matt Cutts had his druthers, buying links would become an extinct SEO practice. Cutts has addressed the topic of link-buying on a number of occasions on his blog and in blog comments elsewhere. He's admonished webmasters who buy links for PageRank and encouraged webm...

SEO

SEO Report Card: Freshpair.com

January 2, 2007 • Stephan Spencer

This month marks the one-year anniversary of the SEO Report Card. During this time, I have received many kind words from both readers and report card recipients — words of gratitude and encouragement — for which I am grateful. I hope to render even more assistance in 2007. Now that y...

SEO

SEO Report Card: Scrappopotamus.com

December 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

It is time for another MIVA Merchant-powered ecommerce site to get picked apart. I will try to be gentle. This month's "selectee" has the coolest name - Scrappopotamus. It is a pretty nice-looking website as far as ecommerce sites go, but with an Alexa rank of 1,338,118 (i.e., the 1,338...

SEO

SEO Toolkit

December 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

If you consider that search engine optimization (SEO) is a scientific discipline, then you'll agree that obtaining empirical measurements using a comprehensive suite of tools is an absolute must. Every day should be filled with experimentation, data collection and more experimentation. ...

SEO

SEO Report Card: Coolbugstuff.com

November 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

This month I’ve chosen a fun, quirky ecommerce site, Coolbugstuff.com about insects. Seth Prezant, founder and “bugmaster” (gotta love that title) at Cool Bug, LLC, explains he had an outside company assemble the website for him, and it has been in operation for almost five months. Unfo...

SEO

SEO: Choosing a Vendor

November 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

Selecting an SEO vendor to help improve your site’s searchengine visibility is fraught with hidden dangers.What if the vendor uses unscrupulous tactics without your knowledge, and you get penalized? What if they make promises that they can’t possibly keep? What if they just aren’t very ...

SEO

SEO Report Card: Shopwildplanet.com

October 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

This month’s recipient of an SEO critique is Shopwildplanet.com. Since my SEO how-to column this month is on RSS feeds, I thought it would be only fitting that the website that I critique have an RSS feed. Brian Almashie of 3D Joe Corporation, the firm that built the site for Wild Pla...

SEO

SEO: RSS Feeds Increase Visibility

October 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a great way to deliver content into the hands of potential website visitors. It is also a channel for syndicating your content onto others’ websites. And, of course, with that comes links—deep links into your latest products, best sellers, articles, bu...

Screenshot of Google's home page on a computer screen

Technical SEO

SEO: Breadcrumb Trail Boosts Rankings

September 1, 2006 • Stephan Spencer

Breadcrumbs are text-based navigation showing visitors where they are in a website's navigation. While helpful for humans, breadcrumbs also greatly help with search engine optimization.

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 ...