Technical SEO Archives

8-step SEO Crawl Audit for Ecommerce

August 18, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

Your site won’t rank if search engine bots can’t crawl it. And hidden doors that don’t impact human visitors can lock bots out. Use these eight steps to ensure search bots can access all of your ecommerce site.

Technical SEO

SEO Tips When URLs Differ for Mobile and Desktop

August 5, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

If you still have a separate mobile ecommerce site, meaning that you have different URLs for mobile and desktop, your search engine optimization requires extra effort.

Technical SEO

SEO: Analyzing Googlebot Crawls for Problems, Inefficiencies

July 28, 2019 • Hamlet Batista

Crawl budget inefficiencies can affect organic search performance if new or updated content is not getting crawled and indexed. In this post, I will explain how to generate reports to help determine if your site has a Googlebot crawl budget problem.

Technical SEO

SEO: How Google Reads and Renders JavaScript

July 24, 2019 • Armando Roggio

JavaScript can improve a shopper's buying experience, encourage interaction, and even bolster site performance in some cases. But where search engine optimization is concerned, JavaScript requires an extra degree of care.

Technical SEO

SEO: Optimizing Crawl Budget for Ecommerce Sites

July 17, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Optimizing an ecommerce site for crawl budget may impact how often Google's web crawler, Googlebot, visits a given page and how quickly that page appears in search results. It can also guide Googlebot to the most important content on a site, which could impact how those pages rank.

Technical SEO

SEO Checklist for Website Redesigns and Replatforms

July 7, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

Major website redesigns and replatforms can kill organic search traffic. Use this checklist to minimize the impact.

Technical SEO

SEO: Can Ecommerce Sites Win the Answer Box?

May 26, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

The "answer box" is Google’s way of responding to questions directly from the top of the search results page. Can ecommerce sites win the answer box? Absolutely. But winning the answer box for their own brand searches is not as straightforward as it may seem.

Technical SEO

How to Expedite Product Changes in Google Organic Listings

April 30, 2019 • Hamlet Batista

In this post, I will cover a technique of updating organic listings using the Google Shopping API. The goal is to accelerate the impact of the Shopping feed on natural search.

Technical SEO

Measuring Traffic from Google Shopping’s New Organic Listings

March 27, 2019 • Hamlet Batista

In my previous article, I explained how Google Shopping is expanding to include free organic search listings. The next step is to explore an easy way to measure the performance of organic traffic coming from Shopping feeds.

Technical SEO

SEO: Lessons from Google’s ‘rel=prev/next’ Pagination Identifier

March 24, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization professionals were caught off guard this week by Google’s admission that it hasn’t used its pagination identifier in “a number of years.” The admission reinforces the requirement ...

Technical SEO

7 Ways to Integrate SEO with IT

March 4, 2019 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization relies heavily on support from information technology personnel. Improving relationships and processes between the SEO and IT teams greases the skids so that support is in place before a critical need arises.

Technical SEO

Real-time SEO: Create a Google Product Feed from an XML Sitemap

February 26, 2019 • Hamlet Batista

It is now possible to update product listings in organic search results in real time via a product feed. In this article, I’ll explain how to create a feed from an XML sitemap.

Technical SEO

How Query Intent Impacts Ecommerce SEO

February 21, 2019 • Bill Sebald

Google attempts to understand the intent of a searcher's query. The company recognizes the burden of providing the best results, even if the query is vague. For example, if someone types in “jaguar,” Google has to figure out what that searcher wants.

Technical SEO

6 SEO Myths about Alt Tags

December 10, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown

Alt tags are a frequent to-do item for search engine optimization. But there's much confusion surrounding the importance of optimizing alt tags. So it’s time for some myth-busting around this oft-misunderstood topic.

Technical SEO

Use HTML Caching to Increase Page Speed

December 9, 2018 • Hamlet Batista

Heavy traffic to a website can result in performance problems, slower page speed, and fewer conversions. In this article, I'll share a simple process to speed up page loads. The idea is to cache not just images and scripts, but also the HTML content.

Technical SEO

SEO: Why Is Metadata Important?

November 19, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown

This article will describe at a high level the types of metadata most commonly used in SEO. Pay careful attention to the terminology. Meta tags are metadata, but not all metadata are meta tags. Some elements commonly called “tags” are actually attributes of a tag.

Technical SEO

SEO: Understanding Sitemaps for Ecommerce Stores

October 3, 2018 • Armando Roggio

Sitemaps inform search engines which pages on a website should be crawled, and may help search engines discover and index those pages. While sitemaps can be a simple text file listing ...

Technical SEO

Technical SEO: 15 Critical Areas That Impact Performance

September 30, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown

The technical aspects of search engine optimization can seem mysterious, especially for content marketers. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The 15 areas below cover the major areas. 15

Technical SEO

Change Organic Search Snippets to Drive Motivated Buyers

September 28, 2018 • Hamlet Batista

In “How to Increase Click-throughs on Organic Search Listings,” I addressed the importance of compelling messages in organic snippets. In this article, I will dig deeper. I will explore how ...

Technical SEO

SEO: Building a 301 Redirect Strategy

September 16, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown

When a site’s URLs change, 301 redirects are crucial to preserve and grow natural search performance. Organic search rankings depend in large part on link authority: the quantity and quality of ...

Technical SEO

SEO: Retaining Performance on Site Migrations

September 7, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown

Site migrations are risky for natural search performance. Whether you’re migrating a site to a new design or rebranding, what you do before the new site is live will determine its natural search performance.

Technical SEO

SEO Is Way More Than Metadata

August 19, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown

Metadata is just data about data. In the world of organic search, that means title tags and meta descriptions, schema structured data, canonical tags, meta robots tags and the like.

Technical SEO

SEO: 7 Reasons Your Site’s Indexation Is Down

August 3, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown

Without indexation, there is no possibility of ranking in natural search results. When indexation numbers drop, there are a handful of potential reasons. Site Speed Increasingly, slower site speeds are masquerading as ...

Technical SEO

SEO: Shaving Seconds Off Page Speed

July 9, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown

For customers, site speed matters. For search engines, site speed impacts organic rankings. With its mobile Speed Update rolling out now, Google is applying site speed to mobile search results ...

Technical SEO

SEO: Harnessing Facets to Drive the Meaty Torso

June 15, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown

Natural search performance on ecommerce sites often suffers from an invisible problem: a missing torso. For search engine optimization, a “torso” describes keywords that drive too many searches to be called ...

Technical SEO

SEO: 3 Paths to Crawlable JavaScript

June 3, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown

Last week’s primer described some of the reasons that Googlebot, in particular, has trouble with modern forms of JavaScript. This article addresses solutions to compensate for bots’ limitations.

Technical SEO

SEO: No, Google Does Not Support Newer JavaScript

May 25, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown

Some search engine optimization professionals and developers have concluded in the last couple of years that Google can crawl JavaScript. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Sites using Angular (the ...

Technical SEO

301 Redirects May Save Your SEO

May 4, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown

A search engine professional’s lucky number is 301. That’s the server header status code for a type of redirect that performs many critical functions for natural search performance. What Is a ...

Technical SEO

SEO: Managing Modern Algorithm Updates

April 27, 2018 • Jill Kocher Brown

Google launched a broad core algorithm update last week that impacted web search appearance and rankings. Algorithm changes typically center on rankings improvements tied to determining the quality of a site’s ...

Technical SEO

How to Optimize Mobile Search for Voice, Barcodes, and Images

April 18, 2018 • Hamlet Batista

The traditional behavior of typing keyword phrases in a Google’s search box is being replaced by searches for voice, barcodes, and images. It is impractical to type long-tail searches on mobile devices. But this difficulty also presents opportunities. In this post, I'll address how to optimize mobile searches for voice, barcodes, and images.