Technical SEO
Technical search engine optimization refers to the structure and organization of a site for maximum search engine visibility. Our coverage addresses structured data (Schema.org), website hierarchy, menus, categories, page speed, bot crawlers (including Googlebot), domain names, and more.
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Technical SEO
SEO: For Redesigns and Migrations, Prepare for the Worst
December 1, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
You spend months preparing for your ecommerce redesign or migration. You take search engine optimization into consideration and anticipate an increase in organic search traffic after launch. But what happens ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: How to Perform a Flash Audit, to Restore Traffic
November 14, 2017 • Hamlet Batista
I’m often asked to help reverse drops in traffic from organic search. It usually occurs from major site developments, such as redesigns and ecommerce platform changes. Traffic drops can be ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: 7 Ways to Kill Duplicate Content
November 12, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
Duplicate content is endemic to ecommerce sites. Seemingly every platform, no matter how SEO-friendly, produces some form of duplicate content, holding a site back from peak performance. First, let’s look at ...
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Technical SEO
SEO Fire Drill: ‘Traffic Is Down!’
October 15, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
Organic search traffic often drives significant revenue for ecommerce sites. As a result, it is prone to fire drills around performance. Here’s how to determine when there’s a critical problem ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: How to Improve Site-specific Ranking Factors
October 10, 2017 • Hamlet Batista
A client recently attended a webinar where a presenter provided a list of the top search engine ranking factors. The client wanted me to confirm the list, or provide my ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Making Recommendations on Mockups
September 15, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
Mockups are a key part of creating new marketing campaigns and redesigning entire websites. As partners in the process of producing those new experiences, search-engine-optimization professionals should offer feedback at ...
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Technical SEO
How to Incrementally Move an Ecommerce Site to HTTPS
August 27, 2017 • Hamlet Batista
In October, Google Chrome will release version 62, which will warn website visitors with a “Not Secure” message when they type in data — such as site searches and newsletter ...
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Technical SEO
3 SEO Wins (Often Overlooked) for Ecommerce Sites
July 16, 2017 • Hamlet Batista
There is more to search engine optimization than keywords, titles, meta descriptions, and H1s. In this post, I’ll address three valuable, and often overlooked, SEO opportunities for ecommerce sites: PDFs,
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Technical SEO
SEO: 7 Reasons to Use a Site Crawler
July 14, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
No matter how well you think you know your site, a crawler will always turn up something new. In some cases, it’s those things that you don’t know about that ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Your Faceted Navigation Could Be Better
May 15, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
Faceted navigation drives traffic and sales for valuable long-tail search phrases because it applies increasingly refined attributes to shoppers’ searches for their desired products. Optimizing your faceted navigation is the ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Faceted Navigation Is Your Biggest Opportunity
May 7, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
Regardless of what your ecommerce site sells, the biggest opportunity for improving your natural search performance is likely optimizing faceted navigation. Also known as faceted or guided search, faceted navigation applies ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Creating the Perfect URL, or Not
April 28, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
URLs are what search engines use to aggregate all the data they collect regarding a page of content. For search engine optimization, what’s in a URL can be the difference ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Harnessing Domain Authority across Multiple Websites
April 24, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
Every domain acquires authority based largely on the quality and quantity of links pointing to it. When your business model necessitates multiple domains, harness them in a mutually beneficial linking ...
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Technical SEO
Using Server Logs to Uncover SEO Problems
April 11, 2017 • Hamlet Batista
Sometimes websites have search-engine-optimization problems that Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and off-the shelf SEO tools cannot locate. When this occurs, I often rely on an old-school method: web server logs. What ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: How to Detect, Correct Duplicate Content Pages
March 23, 2017 • Hamlet Batista
Duplicate content remains a common obstacle when it comes to increasing organic search traffic on retailer websites. Here are some of the advantages of addressing duplicate content to increase SEO performance,
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Technical SEO
SEO: How to Migrate an Ecommerce Site to HTTPS
March 8, 2017 • Hamlet Batista
Google began encouraging websites to move to encrypted SSL connections, which carry the HTTPS reference in the URL, as early as 2014. Google promised a ranking boost to sites that ...
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Technical SEO
How to Avoid SEO Disaster from a Replatform
February 22, 2017 • Hamlet Batista
Redesigning your ecommerce site or changing platforms is nerve racking. It’s easy to miss an important step and lose valuable organic search traffic and revenue. I have assisted many ecommerce sites ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: How to Quickly Reverse a Traffic Downtrend
January 31, 2017 • Hamlet Batista
During a website redesign, re-platform, or domain change, it is not uncommon to see a reduction in organic search traffic. The panic generally starts weeks after trying one thing after ...
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Technical SEO
Using Caching (and Hardware) to Improve Page Speed
January 25, 2017 • Eric Davis
In “3 Backend Fixes to Increase Page Speed,” my article last month, I explained that caching can be applied to many areas of an ecommerce website. In this post, I’ll ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Google Rolls Out Mobile Popup Penalty
January 13, 2017 • Jill Kocher Brown
Right on schedule, this week Google began rolling out its intrusive mobile popup penalty, aimed at reducing the number of results that take mobile searchers to pages that use large ...
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Technical SEO
3 Backend Fixes to Increase Page Speed
December 30, 2016 • Eric Davis
Page speed is an important factor in search rankings and conversion rates. Every improvement to page speed will likely result in more sales. We’ve addressed page speed at, most recently, “10
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Technical SEO
4 Things to Check for Holiday Ecommerce Traffic
November 16, 2016 • Bill Hartzer
The holiday shopping season is here. Millions of consumers are looking for holiday deals. Preparing your marketing campaigns, such as social media ads and email promotions, is imperative. Beyond that,
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Technical SEO
SEO: To Drive Shoppers, Let the Bots In
November 6, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
We rely on search engines to drive shoppers to our sites to purchase our products. Before the shoppers can come, however, you have to let the bots in. It sounds more ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Accelerated Mobile Pages for Ecommerce
October 14, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages protocol makes mobile sites faster. Faster sites typically see lower bounce rates, higher time-on-site numbers, and higher conversion rates. AMP also benefits natural search performance. Smartphone users want speed.
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Technical SEO
SEO: Reclaiming Links to Deleted Pages
October 2, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
When pages on your site go away, their link authority is wasted. But you can harvest that precious link authority and redirect it to other pages on your site, those ...
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Technical SEO
Google Penguin Now Part of Core Search Algorithm
September 24, 2016 • Bill Hartzer
Google just announced that its Penguin algorithm is now a part of its core algorithm, updated in real time. Google last updated Penguin a few years ago. Updating Penguin continuously will likely affect many businesses. Recall that Google Penguin monitors ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: Simplifying Navigation Cuts Performance
September 9, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
The trend toward simplicity in web design is affecting navigation. The impact on search engine optimization of navigation changes can be staggering. Navigation isn’t just a way for shoppers to navigate.
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Technical SEO
The Real Benefit of Accelerated Mobile Pages
July 10, 2016 • Armando Roggio
The Accelerated Mobile Pages project’s restrictive subset of HTML tags, CSS, and JavaScript encourages web developers and designers to employ practices that may improve the mobile web experience. Contributor Jill Kocher ...
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Technical SEO
3 Server Errors That Drain SEO
July 8, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
Servers are the foundation of the web, but their archaic status codes have a big impact on search engine optimization that few marketers understand well enough. Three types of server ...
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Technical SEO
SEO: How Search Engines Work
March 27, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engines trawl the web, sifting through billions of data points to serve up information in a fraction of a second. The access to instant information we’ve come to take ...