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SEO

SEO
Yes, Toxic Backlinks Can Still Harm Search Rankings

May 12, 2020 • Armando Roggio

When a website links to your online store, that site is indicating it finds your content valuable enough to share with its own audience. Google and other search engines recognize this vote of confidence, which may boost your site's ranking. For this reason, many search engine optimizers covet backlinks.
SEO
11 Do-it-yourself SEO Tips to Save Money

May 6, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization takes time and money. If you’re short on time but have the money, an agency or consultant is an option. If you’re short on money, use these do-it-yourself tips to boost your site’s organic rankings.
SEO
Google Brings Back Free Shopping Listings

April 30, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

This week, after a 12-year hiatus, Google reintroduced free listings to the shopping tab of search result pages. These free listings potentially fill a need that has been festering for years, enabling more ecommerce sites to compete in shopping searches.
SEO
SEO: Target Informational Rankings with Pillars and Clusters

April 21, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Unless it's a major brand, an ecommerce site’s category and product pages may not rank organically for informational search queries. Creating pillar and cluster pages can help.
SEO
The Role of Accessibility in SEO

April 14, 2020 • Bill Sebald

In the early years, search-engine optimizers typically equated accessibility with rankings. We focused on algorithms. A website that's accessible to users with disabilities would also be accessible to Google. Or so we thought. Things are different today.
SEO
SEO: Auditing Backlinks with Google Search Console

April 12, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

The best backlinks are the ones search engines know about. Four reports in Google Search Console help analyze the strength of your backlink portfolio. Search engines use backlinks — the links from other sites to yours — in their algorithms as measures of value and authority.
SEO
13 Free SEO Courses, Beginner to Advanced

April 7, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Being stuck at home due to Covid-19 is an excellent time to improve your search engine optimization skills. The following seven learning sites offer, collectively, 13 free SEO courses. Some include free certificates of completion to showcase your new skills on LinkedIn or elsewhere.
SEO
Page Speed Scores of Every Shopify Theme

April 7, 2020 • Hamlet Batista

I recently worked with a developer to help a merchant speed up its Shopify store. We improved the page speed for mobile and desktop. But the biggest takeaway was how a Shopify theme impacts the page speed. This post lists page speeds of all 72 Shopify themes.
SEO
SEO: Manage Crawling, Indexing with Robots Exclusion Protocol

April 2, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Indexing is the precursor to ranking in organic search. But there are pages you don’t want the search engines to index and rank. That’s where the "robots exclusion protocol" comes into play.
SEO
SEO: Using Canonical Tags to Reduce Duplicate Content

March 23, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Canonical tags are an essential tool to prevent duplicate content in organic search results. "Canonical" in search engine parlance means the one true page out of potentially many duplicates.
SEO
SEO: 7 Ways Ecommerce Sites Create Duplicate Content

March 15, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

I've never worked with an ecommerce platform that was entirely free of duplicate content. Some platforms are better at containing the sprawl. But one change in the settings or the code could accidentally produce duplicates — i.e., different pages with different URLs for the same piece of content.
SEO
Should Internal Search Results Pages Be Indexed?

March 10, 2020 • Armando Roggio

No, your website's own search results pages should not be indexed by Google and other search engines in most cases. Long-standing search-engine-optimization wisdom says the results pages from your site-search should block search engine bots and not be included in a search engine's index of pages.
SEO
3 SEO Lessons from Amazon for Ecommerce Product Pages

March 8, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Product detail pages on Amazon rank for roughly 34 million keywords in Google in the U.S. In this post, I'll address three tips for optimizing the product pages on your own ecommerce site using lessons from Amazon.
SEO
SEO: Why Your Faceted Navigation Pages Aren’t Ranking

March 1, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

The filters and facets utilized by ecommerce sites allow shoppers to quickly narrow a product set by color, style, or other attributes. It's called faceted navigation. It's ideal for targeting keywords with midsized demand. And it can seriously boost organic search traffic.
SEO
Analyze Competitors’ Breadcrumbs for Categories, Products

February 25, 2020 • Hamlet Batista

Knowing the breadcrumb navigation of your ecommerce competitors can be helpful. It could identify missing categories on your own site, navigation ideas, and even competitors' best-selling products.
SEO
Google Downgrades Nofollow Directive. Now What?

February 24, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

On March 1, Google will no longer consider nofollow attributes as commands. Instead, they will be hints, much like canonical tags. Until now, nofollow attributes have been a protective barrier between your site's authority and the potentially questionable sites it links to.
SEO
Scalable SEO Strategies to Boost Category Pages

February 20, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Large-scale improvements in organic search performance require large-scale changes. Ecommerce merchants tend to optimize product detail pages. Many merchants overlook category pages, which can provide more organic-search opportunities.
SEO
SEO: When to Scale (or Not)

February 17, 2020 • Bill Sebald

Most ecommerce platforms have improved their SEO functionality to enable easy, sitewide changes. But it's impossible to scale SEO entirely.
SEO
6 Ways to Know If Your SEO Is Broken

February 9, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Gut feel. That's how ecommerce marketers sometimes gauge the health of their search engine optimization program. SEO contains many gray areas, for sure. But an evaluation requires data, not a hunch. Use these six methods — in order — to determine the health of your SEO program.
SEO
Compare SEO Stats for Acquisition Candidates, Guest Post Options

February 7, 2020 • Armando Roggio

There are plenty of instances that require an in-depth analysis of organic search performance. But other times a quick overview is enough. An example of the latter is a brief comparison of multiple domains. In this post, I will address the benefits of contrasting SEO across multiple domains.
SEO
Analyze Competitors for High-traffic Content Ideas

February 3, 2020 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce competitors can be a good source of inspiration and ideas. Analyzing a competitor's content could generate ideas for your own company's articles, videos, podcasts, or similar. In this post, I'll look at a simple way to produce content marketing ideas from your competitors.
SEO
SEO: 7 Shopper-grabbing Rich Snippets for Ecommerce

February 2, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

It’s increasingly difficult for organic search listings — the 10 blue links — to win the click. Rich snippets, which are powered by structured data, can make your links stand out. Here seven types of rich snippets that enhance blue links and thus drive clicks and sales.
SEO
Google’s ‘Host-crowding’ Tweak Impacts Sites with Featured Snippets

January 26, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

The term "host crowding" refers to multiple organic search listings from a single domain for the same query. With its latest update, Google changed host crowding by removing the traditional organic listing on page 1 when that site occupies the featured snippet.
SEO
Lessons from 20 Years of Google Algorithm Updates

January 23, 2020 • Bill Sebald

I have been optimizing sites for over 20 years. Still, I sometimes fail to reach the improvements I expected. A strategy may look good on paper but not align to Google’s latest (and secret) algorithm.
SEO
How to Rank in Google’s New Popular Products

January 19, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Facing declining product searches thanks to marketplaces such as Amazon and Walmart, Google amped up its ecommerce search game last week with a new organic search feature: popular products.
SEO
Outsourcing SEO Starts with Knowing Your Needs

January 13, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown

Ecommerce merchants have many choices for outsourcing search engine optimization. Finding the right agency often comes down to knowing your business's needs, as well as understanding the different types of SEO services.
SEO
5 Obstacles to SEO Success

December 20, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

I’ve worked in SEO for 14 years. In my experience, the following five deficiencies will likely block efforts to improve organic search performance
SEO
Are SEO Audits Worth the Money?

December 17, 2019 • Bill Sebald

An SEO audit can cover any number of components — technical, content, competitive, backlinks, mobile, and analytics. Or it can be even more detailed. The risk of a generic SEO audit is that it scratches the surface, with little benefit.
SEO
5 SEO Wives’ Tales That Won’t Go Away

December 13, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

There’s a wives’ tale that white wine will remove a red-wine stain. Another claims that eating an apple a day will keep a doctor away. Similarly, many wives’ tales surround search engine optimization. The five below I hear the most from clients and other marketers.
SEO
How to Make SEO Happen in 2020

December 6, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

Effective search engine optimization takes preparation and planning. Random action produces haphazard results. Here’s how to make your SEO plans come to life in 2020.

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