4 Simple Visuals to Explain SEO

Excerpts from my latest article at Practical eCommerce: “4 Simple Visuals to Explain SEO.”

When talking to marketers, it can be nearly impossible to get them to look beyond the brand imagery and user experience they’ve crafted for their customers online. And while they’re locked into that perception of their site it’s very difficult to explain why search engines don’t perceive their site exactly as they do. These three simple visuals can help shatter those perceptual walls and open the door to more productive SEO discussions.

 

Read more about the thinking behind these visuals and how to create them for any site at “4 Simple Visuals to Explain SEO.”

Read the article in full at Practical eCommerce »


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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

Three Steps to Better Search Rankings

My latest on NBC 5 Chicago’s Inc. Well: “How to Get Better Search Rankings

Optimizing a site’s title tags is one of the simplest and most effective actions you can take to improve a site’s search engine optimization. Many content management systems create default title tags based on the site’s name and the page’s name, in that order. Others smear a single title tag on every page across large sections of the site. Depending on how suboptimal the title tags are today, optimizing them could have a real impact on a site’s organic search performance.

  • Step One: Keyword Research
  • Step Two: Review Analytics
  • Step Three: Optimize Title Tags

Read the whole article with details on each step at “How to Get Better Search Rankings.”


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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

Is Your Store Locator Hiding?

Excerpts from my latest article at Practical eCommerce: “SEO: Can Local Searchers Find Your Stores?

Store location pages fill a need much larger than the physical address of a store close to the individual user. Many customers already know where a store is based on their everyday routines. What they don’t know and are seeking are the hours, holidays that the store is closed, services offered, manager’s name, phone number to call for questions about items, etc. The store locator, then, needs to answer these individual store questions.

Now consider searchers: For all intents and purposes they can drop out of the sky from Google or Bing and land on any page on the site. That makes every page on the site a potential landing page that needs to be able to command customers’ confidence and convert searchers to some next step.

The ideal would be to search Google for a store location, like [northbrook furniture store], and get the exact store locator pages for the relevant stores. This rarely happens, however. Read on to discover why and what you can do about it.

Read the article in full at Practical eCommerce »


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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

Using User Language: UGC and SEO

Excerpts from my latest article at Resource’s weThink blog: “Using UGC to Benefit SEO.”

 

User-generated content (UGC) and search engine optimization (SEO) are a match made in heaven. SEO is done by marketers and can fall prey to same language issues that caused the site to perform poorly in organic search in the first place. But UGC is created by customers and uses the real-world language that other customers and searchers are likely to use.

“Why, is that our new ‘Zip-front Sweatshirt-Black-With Hood?’” asks the marketer.

“No,” replies the puzzled customer. “It’s a “black hoodie.’”

So while the marketer busily optimizes for the product name, the customer logs on to write a review about the great new “hoodie” he just bought.

That review, a free bit of UGC gold, contributes to the keyword theme of the page and begins to send “hoodie” relevance signals. The more customers write reviews, the stronger the signals become.

Read the article in full at Resource’s weThink blog »


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Originally posted on Web PieRat.