Jill Kocher Brown

Articles by: Jill Kocher Brown

Jill Kocher Brown

Jill Kocher Brown is a writer and search engine optimization expert in Chicago. She has been living and breathing search engine optimization since 2005, and has been in digital marketing since 1996.

Jill cut her digital teeth at Intel, managing the home page and corporate sections of Intel.com. After that, Jill managed and developed ecommerce SEO consulting practices at Netconcepts and Covario, served as Groupon’s first in-house SEO director, and pioneered IBM's SEO consulting practice.

She now heads up the SEO practice at JumpFly, a marketing agency.

Jill holds a B.A. in Communications and American Studies from Stanford University. Email JIll.

SEO
Why Does SEO Take So Long?

May 25, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search marketing’s two halves are so similar and yet so different. A new pay-per-click advertising campaign can be set up and pushed live, and data starts to roll in that same day. Within a week there may be enough data to analyze performance, tweak and iterate the optimization of the c...
Technical SEO
SEO Site Migration Checklist

May 18, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Migrating a site to a new platform or domain, or implementing a major redesign, is one of the most stressful situations in search engine optimization. The potential for massively impacting organic search traffic and sales is higher during these launches than at any other time. But with ...
Keyword Research
SEO: How to Amplify Keyword Signals

May 11, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization is all about "signal" and "amplification." The signal is simply using relevant keywords. Amplification is about how to use those keywords and encourage linking and sharing. Think of the keywords as the voice of a site and the amplification as a megaphone. The ...
SEO
SEO Professionals Can Harm an Ecommerce Business

May 4, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Like Bon Jovi’s song, “You Give Love a Bad Name,” some search engine optimization companies give that profession a bad reputation. Practical eCommerce recently fielded a question from a reader wondering why his site was being penalized for work his SEO company had done on his behalf. It...
Technical SEO
Google’s Over-Optimization Penalty an Evolution, Not Revolution

April 27, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Google’s much discussed over-optimization penalty turned out to be a moderate evolutionary step in Google’s site quality crusade. Launched April 24, Google wrote in a blog post of its update, “The change will decrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s quality gui...
Link Building
SEO: Avoid Link Building Shortcuts

April 19, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

There are no safe link building shortcuts. Instead I want to warn marketers about deceptive search marketers and the dangers of using “easy” link building tactics. In the latest instance, the search engine optimization community is abuzz with news that Home Depot’s SEO team has attempt...
Link Building
SEO: Build Relationships, Not Links

April 13, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

When the Internet was new, it was difficult to find interesting and relevant websites. Link building was easy in those days. It was often just a matter of letting webmasters know that your site existed and they could link to it. Things have changed in the last couple of decades. Webmas...
SEO
SEO and PPC: Synergistic or Cannibalistic?

April 6, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Many ecommerce managers wonder whether the paid search ads they place enhance or cannibalize the organic search results. They wonder, in other words, if they end up paying for clicks they could have had for free organically. A recent study by Google suggests that the relationship betwee...
Technical SEO
Google’s Secure Search Squeezes SEO Planning and Reporting

March 30, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Google's secure SSL search protects users' search results and the keywords they searched on. Unfortunately, it also poses a growing threat to data-driven search engine optimization. Firefox recently joined Google Chrome — and Google.com, for logged-in users — in defaulting to secure sea...
Technical SEO
Google Plans SEO Over-Optimization Penalty

March 22, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Google’s head spam cop Matt Cutts announced the impending launch of a new over-optimization penalty to “level the playing ground.” The disclosure came earlier this month at the South By ...
SEO Tools
Top 5 Reasons to Use Google Webmaster Tools

March 16, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

There’s a common misconception that registering with Google Webmaster Tools somehow enables Google more access to information about a site. In fact, just the opposite is true. Google Webmaster Tools provides site owners access to data available from no other source, data every ecommerce...
SEO
SEO for Mobile Apps and App Stores

March 9, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

The world of mobile applications is foreign territory to most Internet marketers. App development requires different skills than traditional website development. App planning and design forces marketers to understand the limitations of different platforms and devices. But once an app i...
Technical SEO
SEO Benefits of Responsive Web Design

March 1, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Site owners have many competing needs when developing mobile sites. Different devices, different capabilities, different screen sizes and resolutions, all have an impact on designing and developing mobile sites today. According to Mongoose Metrics, a tracking and analysis firm, only 9...
SEO
BloomReach to Change SEO Technology?

February 24, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization, boiled down, is the process of making sure a web page ends up highly ranked on search results, for searches relevant to that page. A merchant selling "Columbia Traverse Men's Hiking Shoes," for example, will want to optimize its product page so that searches ...
On-page SEO
SEO: Optimizing Ratings, Reviews and Comments

February 17, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Content that consumers leave on an ecommerce site can improve the site’s search engine optimization, if the platforms and underlying code are set up optimally. Ratings, reviews and comments each play a part in SEO, utilizing the words and opinions that real shoppers voice to strengthen ...
SEO
SEO Impact of Google’s Search Plus Your World

February 3, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

As search and social become ever more entwined in Google’s and Bing’s algorithms and search results, search engine optimizers cannot afford to turn a blind eye to social media. Bing incorporates Facebook data into its search results. Google has taken another big step with the introducti...
Keyword Research
Optimizing a Page for Search Engines, Part 3: Keywords to Content

January 27, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Editor's Note: This is the final installment of a three-part series on optimizing ecommerce pages for search engines. The first two installments, "Part 1: Keyword Research" and “Part 2: Keyword Mapping,” we published previously. I discussed keyword research and content mapping in detai...
Keyword Research
Optimizing a Page for Search Engines, Part 2: Keyword Mapping

January 20, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Editor's Note: This is the second installment of a three-part series on optimizing ecommerce pages for search engines. The first installment, "Part 1: Keyword Research," we published last week. "Part 3: Keywords to Content" we published after the article, below. Keyword research is ess...
Keyword Research
Optimizing a Page for Search Engines, Part 1: Keyword Research

January 13, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Editor’s Note: This is the first installment of a three-part series on optimizing ecommerce pages for search engines. “Part 2: Keyword Mapping” and “Part 3: Keywords to Content” we published ...
Staffing
10 Tips to Hire a Great SEO Agency

January 10, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Staying on top of search engine optimization requires time and effort that many small businesses can’t afford in-house. One obvious solution is to turn to an agency. But which ones can be trusted and which will under deliver and overcharge? Before just picking the number one result in a...
Social Media
Using Social Buttons to Enhance Search Engine Optimization

January 4, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Social "signals" increasingly influence search results in both Google and Bing. The search engines are coming to consider social signals as more indicative of how searchers value a page than traditional link signals — though links remain very important to search engine optimization. In ...
SEO
How to Benefit from Googlebot-Mobile’s New Smarts

December 16, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Google’s mobile crawler Googlebot-Mobile has traditionally focused on content designed for feature phones and their extremely limited browsers. Google recently announced, however, a new version of Googlebot-Mobile that crawls using an iPhone user agent, enabling it to discover content d...
SEO
Managing SEO and Social Media Together

December 13, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

How etailers manage their social media marketing channel has a growing impact on organic search results. Google and Bing have both incorporated social data into their algorithms to signal content freshness and quality. While the datasets each engine has access to differ, the fact remain...
SEO Tools
5 Conversion Tools for SEO and Beyond

November 29, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

The quickest path to earning more from an ecommerce site's organic search traffic is to convert more consumers who already go there. I addressed that topic previously, at "SEO: Convert More Before Driving More." Many SEO strategies focus on driving more visitors. But what use is driv...
Technical SEO
SEO: Letting Customers Generate Long Tail Search Terms

November 23, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization typically focuses on the trophy terms, the high-volume keyword phrases, because marketers need to drive the highest value with the lowest effort. Unfortunately, those juicy trophy terms are great for brand recognition and customers' initial awareness, but they...
Content Marketing
Syndicating Content for SEO Benefit

November 18, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

When ecommerce companies think about content syndication, they typically consider acquiring content that others have written to beef up their own sites. Depending on the goal, placing content from other sites onto your own can be beneficial from a branding, partnership, or reference poi...
User Experience
Does SEO Conflict with User-Friendly Websites?

November 3, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Google's so-called "Farmer/Panda" algorithm update rewards original, high-quality site content. Aggregators suffer under Panda, as do ecommerce merchants who rely on generic product descriptions that are not unique to their sites, or who offer poor content generally. We've addressed t...
Technical SEO
Navigation: Your Biggest On-Site SEO Asset

October 28, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

A site's navigational links can help its search engine optimization. Links pass "link popularity," little votes of value, from the linking page to the destination page. In addition, the link's anchor text — the visible text portion of the link — passes a relevance signal. Relevance and...
Product Pages
SEO: Convert More Before Driving More

October 20, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Many organic search marketers focus on increasing rankings and traffic to a site. What happens to that traffic once it hits the site, they assume, is someone else's problem. This is a wrong approach. Search marketing's ultimate goal isn't usually to drive more traffic; it's to convert m...
Influencers & Affiliates
SEO: Using Affiliates for Search Marketing

October 13, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

Working in the organic search industry, I’ve often had large search marketing clients who envied the success of their affiliates, which sometimes outperformed their own in-house search marketing efforts. But Carolyn Tang Kmet opened my eyes to the ways that search affiliates can actuall...