Posted by Cyrus Shepard

The following topic was presented at MozCon 2012.

Over the years, SEOs have employed many techniques to control how their site appears in search results. These included:

• Writing compelling Title Tags 65-75 characters long
• Descriptive Meta Descriptions
• Use of NOODP and NOYDIR meta tags
• Keyword rich URLs

By controlling how our snippets appear in search results, we could greatly improve our click-through rates and the amount of free traffic we saw.

But times are changing. For better or worse, Google has now stepped up its title tag rewriting algorithm so that webmasters can no longer predict how their title tags will display...

The Internet continues to grow at an amazing rate. Businesses are able to earn money with direct sales online. This creates both opportunity and increased competition.

To do well in this growth environment, businesses need to promote their websites with search engine optimization. E-commerce allows any business the opportunity to supplement their retail business with online sales. How can online stores strengthen their sites to increase online sales?

1. Social Commerce: Use social interaction to help shoppers make their buying decision. Add product reviews, product ratings and user feedback.
2. Content Growth: Focus on content creation with a blog, articles and how-to guides. Many ecommerce sites today are thin on content.
3. Duplicate Content: Many stores use stock content provid...