7 eCommerce SEO Tips for 2013

Making eCommerce work is becoming increasingly difficult. Google wants to be the sole affiliate on the Web, and Amazon has gained so much market share that it’s difficult to get noticed as an alternative. The search engines increasingly remove commercial sites from the results, replacing them with their own ads and shopping programs. The search results focus more and more on content, not products. 

 

At the same time, a growing number of consumers who were once afraid of shopping online now feel safe with it. More purchases are happening online than ever before. There is opportunity here for the sites that know how to pull ahead. What can the modern eCommerce site do to stay competitive?

These seven tips should help you pull ahead of the competition by modernizing your SEO and leading the push forward in 2013:

Guide to Bringing Your WordPress Blog Up to Today’s Google Algorithm Standards

Keeping up with Google’s ever-changing algorithm updates on WordPress blogs requires constant monitoring and adjustments, which many webmasters fail to keep up with. Following the Penguin algorithm update, millions of bloggers experienced a halt or decrease in traffic.

Although keeping up with industry trends does require frequent updates to continue performing well in search, most tasks are not time consuming at all. This guide will help you understand recent changes to Google’s algorithm and how to update your WordPress blog to follow the new industry standards.

How to Leverage the Knowledge Graph for SEO

Knowledge is power, as the old saying goes. So what do marketers need to know about Google’s Knowledge Graph to power their SEO and search strategies?

There has been a lot of commentary around the semantic Web. The theory is that search results are becoming smarter by distinguishing between words with different meanings. Whether that is true or not largely depends on who you believe and how much stock you place in search engines’ ability to “learn” the wants and needs of their users.

How and When to Diversify Your Anchor Text

Though the Google Penguin update wasn’t technically the over-optimization that spokesperson Matt Cutts hinted might be coming, the algorithm change definitely had an impact on today’s anchor text optimization best practices.

To understand what this means and why this matters, it’s important that you first understand how anchor text is used in Google’s ranking algorithms.

Google, Bing & Yahoo Tracking the 2012 Presidential Election Results

All three of the major U.S. search engines are catering to Americans’ insatiable need for election data today, alongside a few get out the vote initiatives and helpful voter resources.

Dislike Timeline? Facebook Testing New Layout

The wizards of smart at Facebook are testing an new layout for Timeline. This version features a single column for posts, instead of the two columns. The user timeline would still be divided into two columns, but all of your status updates, photos, and other items posted to your timeline would be featured in a wide column on the left. Modules like “photos,” “friends,” “likes,” and any open-graph apps like Spotify and Instagram would appear in a narrower column on the right.

Deconstructing The Google EMD Update

Well, it’s official – no more free lunch for EMD, now that the Google EMD Update has launched. It worked well, for a long time. A whole industry of exact match domain tools and brokers came up. Huge premium prices for good names just went through the roof when it was a real “money keyword.”

For quite a while, it was possible to rank in the TOP3 with literally no backlinks, compared to non EMDs, often after only a few days in literally every niche you can dream of.

Exact Match Domains (AKA Keyword Domains) are, in general, domain names that exactly match the keyword a website wants to compete for. For example, if a website wants to rank for the term [minor weather report], an exact match domain would be [MinorWeatherReport.com].