Category

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
  • SEO

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

    January 10, 2007 •

    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 •

    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 •

    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 •

    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 •

    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 •

    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 •

    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 •

    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 •

    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 •

    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 •

    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 •

    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 •

    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 •

    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 •

    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 ...

  • SEO

    SEO Report Card: As-Seen-on-TV-Store-1.com

    May 30, 2006 •

    Even though I’ve received dozens of requests for site gradings, this month I’ve decided to pick a site that didn’t ask for it. Why? Because this month I’m going to air some poor, unsuspecting black-hat SEO’s dirty laundry in order that you might learn from their mistakes and indiscretio...

  • SEO

    SEO Report Card: Airtroductions.com

    May 1, 2006 •

    This month I decided to evaluate a different sort of ecommerce site – not your standard run-of-the-mill online catalog website. AirTroductions is an ecommerce-enabled matchmaking service for road warriors (currently over 11,000 of them) who are looking for someone interesting to sit nex...

  • Keyword Research

    SEO: Optimizing Your Content

    May 1, 2006 •

    This month, I'd like to build on what I've already covered in past issues regarding keyword research (November 2005 issue) and writing for search engines (December 2005 issue) and integrate them together into a plan for optimizing your site's content. A “SMART” goal is one that is spec...

  • SEO

    SEO Report Card: Golfgods.com

    April 1, 2006 •

    This time around we're going to be taking a slightly different tack, as I was privy to a redesign in-the-making–of golf equipment seller Golfgods.com – with numerous SEO and usability improvements, along with a shift in ecommerce platforms. In fact, by the time this article ends up in p...

  • Link Building

    SEO: Tools for Link Building

    April 1, 2006 •

    In last month's issue, I discussed links and their importance in search engine optimization. Now let's get acquainted with some powerful tools to aide us in our link building efforts. Yahoo! Site Explorer offers a quick way to review competitors' and your own inbound links. PageRank Se...

  • Link Building

    SEO: Weaving a Web of Links

    March 1, 2006 •

    Links are the currency of the web. Not only do their drive traffic in their own right, but they also are essential to high search engine rankings. Without good inbound links to your web site, your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts won't get off the ground. Link building isn't ab...

  • SEO

    SEO Report Card: Stayleaner.com

    March 1, 2006 •

    Each month it gets harder to select an ecommerce site to assess, as the requests from readers keep coming in increasing volume. This month I've chosen Stayleaner.com, the ecommerce site for J & J Health Foods, which sells vitamins, herbs and supplements for sports nutrition and body...

  • Technical SEO

    Optimize Your HTML For Search Engines

    February 1, 2006 •

    SEO can be broken into two distinct areas – "onpage" factors and "off-page" factors. On-page factors include anything that you can affect on the page itself, such as the title tag, body copy, H1 heading tags, image “alt” attributes, etc. Off-page factors encompass things that influence...

  • SEO

    SEO Report Card: Discountflies.com

    February 1, 2006 •

    Welcome back to another installment of “SEO Report Card.” Each month I assess the search engine optimization effectiveness of an ecommerce site. This month's brave volunteer is DiscountFlies.com, an online retailer who sells flies for fly fishing and uses the MIVA Merchant platform. Di...

  • SEO

    Search Engine Optimization: Avoid Complex URLs

    January 1, 2006 •

    Search engines tend to have problems fully indexing dynamic websites (in other words, sites that are hooked up to a database of content). The kinds of sites that search engines have the biggest trouble with are ones that have overly complex URL structures, including numerous variables ...

  • SEO

    SEO Report Card: Balancedlifeproducts.com

    January 1, 2006 •

    Welcome to “SEO Report Card”, where I assess how well search engine optimized a selected ecommerce site is. For this first installment, our guinea pig is BalancedLifeProducts.com, a small ecommerce site, based in Madison, Wisconsin, that sells meditation and massage products such as yog...

  • SEO

    Search Engine Optimization: Writing Effectively

    December 1, 2005 •

    In order to achieve maximum search engine visibility, you need to think a bit like a search engine when writing the copy for your website. Search engines look at the HTML code that makes up your web page and attempts to parse out the textual copy on the page, eliminating the HTML markup...

  • Keyword Research

    Keyword Sleuthing: Locate the Right Word

    November 1, 2005 •

    Effective search engine optimization (“SEO”) starts with keyword research. Chasing after the wrong keywords is a waste, costing you the time and effort you have put into search engine optimization. The "right" keywords are the ones that are not only relevant to your business, but are al...

Popular
Webinar U
Instant Video + Ebook
Our mission is to help online merchants improve their businesses. We do this with expert guides, articles, webinars, and podcasts. We are an independent publishing company, unaffiliated with any e-commerce platform or provider.

Copyright © 2005 - 2023.
Practical Ecommerce® is a
registered trademark of
Confluence Distribution, Inc.

x