In this article Stephan Spencer, Founder and President of Netconcepts, reviews a website of a seasonal company offering tips to increase rankings and online marketing for organic search. Stephan writes, “Competing for organic search visibility during the holiday shopping season requires a ramp-up in online marketing â?? namely, link building and link baiting â?? many months in advance. It should start now, in fact.”
Continue reading »Ward’s appears to have done some search engine optimization (SEO), and it was a good start, but I discovered costly mistakes and much opportunity yet untapped. Currently its site is not present in the first five pages of Google for key terms such as â??lab equipmentâ?? and â??lab suppliesâ?? or for category names such as â??microscopesâ?? and â??chemicals.â??
Continue reading »New sites are always at a disadvantage when it comes to ranking well in Google, particularly when the domain name is new, too. This phenomenon, known by some as the “Google Sandbox” and by others as the “TrustBox,” is not a myth. It is very real and very much an issue for the subject of this issue’s SEO Report Card – the fair trade supporting merchant “Two Hands Worldshop.”
Continue reading »This website critique was conducted by David Fry and Stephan Spencer. David Fry focused on the site’s content and functionality while Stephan Spencer, Founder and President of Netconcepts, tested Jegs.com’s search capabilities.
Continue reading »This month, letâ??s sneak a peek at FreshPair (www.freshpair.com), an underwear etailer, and a small sampling of its backlinks. We will discover thier secret for recieving high search engine rankings for such sought after trophy terms as “panties,” “bras,” and “underwear.” However, its possible, their secrets are better kept in the top drawer.
Continue reading »The firm that built the site for Wild Planet believes they have done a pretty good job of optimizing ShopWildPlanet.com. Let’s see if their confidence is well founded…
Continue reading »Meredith Bright of Yarnware writes: â??I used to have much better organic search rankings, but they have been dropping recently. I canâ??t figure out what is wrong.â?? It wasnâ??t hard to see why. The site is running Lotus Notes Domino â??â?? not a platform that is very friendly to search engines because of its long, complex-looking URLs. However, the issues with the site were much more fundamental. The www.yarnware.com site has broken some cardinal rules of SEO.
Continue reading »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 â??kayak fishing,” “fishing kayakâ?? and “fishing kayaks.” Of course, there is still room for improvement, but it is more a case of finessing and fine-tuning than throwing away the whole site and starting again.
Continue reading »Zearth.comâ??s staff operates a blog at zearth.blogspot.com, although they are relatively new to the concept. They signed up for a free Blogger.com blog, which wasnâ??t ideal as youâ??ll soon discover. The traffic into the blog is only a trickle, but they have received a couple thousand dollars in sales because of it, so itâ??s a start.
Continue reading »Even though Iâ??ve received dozens of requests for site gradings, this month I’ve decided to pick a site that didnâ??t ask for it. Why? Because this month Iâ??m going to air some poor, unsuspecting black-hat SEO’s dirty laundry in order that you might learn from their mistakes and indiscretions, rather than subject a loyal Practical eCommerce reader to potential intense and unwanted scrutiny by search engine reps reading this article. There are so many sites out there committing search engine sins, it was really hard to settle on one.
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