Technical SEO
Technical search engine optimization refers to the structure and organization of a site for maximum search engine visibility. Our coverage addresses structured data (Schema.org), website hierarchy, menus, categories, page speed, bot crawlers (including Googlebot), domain names, and more.
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Technical SEO
SEO: Answer Boxes vs. Featured Snippets
November 10, 2022 • Ann Smarty
Featured snippets are traffic generators. Answer boxes are not. Here's the difference.
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Technical SEO
SEO for Sitelinks
September 22, 2022 • Ann Smarty
Organic sitelinks expand a listing's prominence in search results. But optimizing for sitelinks is frequently unclear. Here's what we know.
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Technical SEO
4 SEO Opportunities in Google Search Console
September 8, 2022 • Ann Smarty
Duplicate content, unknown keywords, poor click rates, and structured data errors — all represent opportunities to improve organic traffic.
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Technical SEO
FAQs for ‘Video pages’ in Search Console
August 29, 2022 • Ann Smarty
Google's new "Video pages" report in Search Console has generated many questions from users. Contributor Ann Smarty addresses four of those questions in this helpful post.
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Technical SEO
SEO for Animated GIFs
August 11, 2022 • Ann Smarty
Animated GIFs can provide unique, crawlable page content, boosting organic search rankings. But GIFs can also harm rankings if poorly executed. We explain.
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Technical SEO
SEO for Featured Snippets
July 28, 2022 • Ann Smarty
Featured snippets appear at the top of Google's organic search results. Optimizing for snippets is different than for standard listings. Here's how.
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Technical SEO
Running Low on SEO Link Juice? Try These Tactics
July 26, 2022 • Armando Roggio
On-page optimization plays an important role in organic search rankings. But it's possible to overdo it to the detriment of other SEO alternatives.
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Technical SEO
SEO: 2 Good Ways to Remove Duplicate Content, and 8 Bad Ones
May 26, 2022 • Ann Smarty
Duplicate content is not subject to a Google penalty, but it does split link equity and thus impact rankings. We explain in this all-new update to a 2019 post.
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Technical SEO
How Domain Names Impact SEO
February 24, 2022 • Ann Smarty
SEO myths surrounding domain names include age, registration length, embedded keywords, and more. Contributor Ann Smarty debunks those while addressing a name's importance in this helpful piece.
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Technical SEO
How to Use Google Autocomplete for SEO
January 27, 2022 • Ann Smarty
Google autocomplete is a staple for identifying keywords to optimize organic rankings. The tool's functionality has expanded to include refinements and entities.
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Technical SEO
SEO for Google’s ‘People also ask’
January 12, 2022 • Ann Smarty
Google's "People also ask" section is a treasure trove of questions from potential customers. It's an optimization opportunity — for rankings in Google as well as conversions on an ecommerce site.
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Technical SEO
How HTML Headings Help SEO
December 30, 2021 • Ann Smarty
HTML headings are phrases or short sentences introducing a new section of content. Google has confirmed that headings help communicate the content's purpose. But search engine optimizers often debate how, exactly, Google uses those headings.
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Technical SEO
SEO: Drive Clicks with Video Rich Snippets
December 23, 2021 • Ann Smarty
Video rich snippets are enriched organic search results in Google. They're an opportunity to generate more clicks, especially on mobile. Publishers often mistake video rich snippets with video carousels.
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Technical SEO
SEO for Brand-name Queries
December 16, 2021 • Ann Smarty
Organic search results on brand-name queries can influence the buying journey. Brand-driven search results on Google appear in multiple sections, although brands have limited control over their appearance and ranking.
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Technical SEO
SEO: Updating Content for Higher Click-throughs
December 8, 2021 • Ann Smarty
Google claims that it shows dates in organic search snippets when its algorithm determines they would be relevant and helpful. In reality, dates are extremely common and have a big impact on click-throughs. Google offers clear guidelines as to how to communicate dates to its algorithm.
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Technical SEO
How to Generate Traffic from Google Discover
December 2, 2021 • Ann Smarty
Google is not just a search engine. It's also a discovery engine. The difference is huge. Searchers have an idea of what they are looking for. They know what they need. But the discovery engine attempts to discern the interests of searchers regardless of their queries. In a sense, Google Discover informs searchers of what they need before they realize it.
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Technical SEO
SEO: Google’s Video Carousels Are a Big Opportunity
November 18, 2021 • Ann Smarty
Google's search result pages have greatly changed over the past decade. In addition to clickable listings, we now see highly visible, often interactive results in diverse formats. One of the newer sections is video carousels.
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Technical SEO
Structured Snippets: The Low-hanging Fruit of SEO
November 11, 2021 • Ann Smarty
I addressed rich snippets last week, explaining how they can enhance organic search listings for ecommerce product pages. Structured snippets are similar in concept, but they don't receive as much attention in the context of organic search. I'll address structured snippets in this post.
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Technical SEO
Using Rich Snippets for Ecommerce Product Pages
November 4, 2021 • Ann Smarty
Rich snippets are additional details in organic listings that stand out in search results. Ratings, prices, FAQs, videos — all are examples of rich snippets. "Structured markup" is programming code that creates rich snippets. Any website can contain structured markup — Schema.org is the most popular type.
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Technical SEO
SEO: 10 FAQs for Internal Links
March 9, 2021 • Jill Kocher Brown
Internal links benefit search engine optimization. But knowing how to use them and understanding their value is not always clear. What follows are 10 frequently asked questions for internal-link management for SEO.
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Technical SEO
SEO: Common Fixes to Core Web Vitals
February 9, 2021 • Jill Kocher Brown
Google stated in November that Core Web Vitals would become a ranking signal in May 2021. When Google announces such a change, heed the warning. The sooner you prepare, the better the chance of preserving or improving your organic search traffic.
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Technical SEO
Don’t Overlook Technical SEO in 2021
January 27, 2021 • Armando Roggio
Good ecommerce and blogging platforms should, by default, take care of most technical search engine optimization concerns. But this doesn't mean B2B and B2C ecommerce companies can ignore technical SEO in 2021.
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Technical SEO
SEO: What Google’s New Passage Indexing Means for Ecommerce
November 5, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
In its never-ending quest to improve search results, Google is extending natural language processing to "passage indexing," ranking individual sentences or phrases within a page. Google addressed this latest update in an October 15 blog post. The update will impact an estimated 7 percent of its search queries worldwide.
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Technical SEO
‘Domain Age Impacts Rankings’ (and 8 Other SEO Myths)
October 5, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
Many myths surround the complex signals that search engines use to determine organic rankings. In this post, I'll debunk nine such myths and share the four factors that matter.
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Technical SEO
FAQ Snippets Expand Organic Search Visibility
September 22, 2020 • Bill Sebald
There is one rich snippet that has become increasingly popular: frequently asked questions. An FAQ snippet expands a listing's real estate in organic search results. It's based on implementing FAQ Schema in the code.
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Technical SEO
Google Lighthouse SEO Scores of Every Shopify Theme
August 12, 2020 • Hamlet Batista
This post addresses the SEO capabilities of every Shopify theme, using Lighthouse, across various page types — home, products, collections, blogs — for desktop and mobile.
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Technical SEO
SEO How-to, Part 11: Mitigating Risk
August 10, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
The risk to organic search performance from altering a website usually comes from changes to content, linking structures, or underlying technology. With careful planning and execution, however, you can mitigate the risk from those changes and increase the likelihood of better rankings. This is the 11th installment in my "SEO How-to" series
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Technical SEO
SEO How-to, Part 10: Redesigns, Migrations, URL Changes
August 4, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
Changes in content, linking, and URL structure can dramatically impact organic search performance. Thus it's critical to understand the search engine risks and rewards from a new design before you start developing it. This is the 10th installment in my "SEO How-to" series.
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Technical SEO
SEO How-to, Part 9: Diagnosing Crawler Issues
July 27, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engines must crawl and index your site before it can rank in organic search. Thus optimizing your content is pointless if search engines cannot access it. This is the ninth installment in my “SEO How-to” series.
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Technical SEO
SEO How-to, Part 8: Architecture and Internal Linking
July 20, 2020 • Jill Kocher Brown
The structure of your ecommerce site — categories, subcategories, attributes — heavily impacts search engine optimization. This is the eighth installment in my “SEO How-to” series.
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