To make your online store appear in the search results in popular search engines, you need yo ensure that its pages are indexed by search robots (crawlers). And that is only possible if you “tell“ them about your new store using one of these two methods:
By link from another website
Talk to the owners of other websites to add a link to your online storefront to their sites; e.g., as part of the link exchange, or by publishing interesting articles in blogs or anywhere else.
You may also try to use special automated link exchange services.
Via website submission form found on the search engines' websites:
Google (http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl)
Bing (http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx)
After your store's URL gets registered in the search index databases, it is very useful to make the link to your website appear at the top of the search results for certain queries that are relevant to your content. Any actions that are required to achieve this are called search engine optimization, or SEO.
Good optimization with long-term positive results may require significant expenses of time and money. For example, you man want to use context advertising services such as Google AdWords to achieve that. For very good results within a shorter period of time, order SEO services from experienced specialists. Remember that promises to “move your website up to TOP 3 in search results within one month“ may not always be what SEO companies are really able to fulfill. High quality search engine optimization means constant hard work on the improvement of the design and content of your website.
Some SEO tips
robots.txt
Write robots.txt directives for search engines and save them in the appropriate section of the Site app by taking our recommendations into account. This will help you prevent non-relevant pages (i.e. pages which do not contain useful information for your visitors; e.g., product search or shopping cart pages) from being indexed and avoid excessive load on your server caused by search engine crawlers.
TITLE & META
Do fill in the TITLE and META tag fields for your products and categories! When you create or edit products, consider using the {$name}, {$summary}, {$price} variables, they are automatically replaced by the name, brief description (summary), and current price of the product. Note that the TITLE element and META tag description are often used by search engines to generate snippets for the found websites, which are displayed in their search results pages. Therefore, it is important to be able to control the contents of those snippets which Internet users see next to your website URL in the search results. Use the variables or write the desired values manually, do not let search engines generate your snippets automatically, because it is only you who can write the right content for your own website.
Articles
Publish detailed and relevant articles using the Blog app or info pages in Shop-Script (open the “Design“ section in your store's backend to create info pages). Constant publishing of relevant content will have positive effect on your website's rating in search engines.
Avoid copying text or images from other websites, as unauthorized use of protected intellectual property may result in serious sanctions by those website owners, your web hosting company, or search engines.
Google Analytics
Sign up for a Google Analytics account and enable integration with this web service in the backend of the Site app. The statistical information collected by Google Analytics will help you find out which of your storefront pages are visited more often and correct your search engine optimization efforts to achieve better results.
А/B testing
Always try to increase your store's efficiency by means of the А/B testing of various storefront pages and storefront elements. It is one of the most effective methods to determine exactly what and where must be changed to make an online store more profitable.
Never stop!
The most essential point in the search engine optimization is to stay persistent in your work. There is no well-known method of performing search engine optimization only once and then enjoying its results during a long period of time.
Useful SEO features in Shop-Script
A large amount of work related to the search engine optimization is performed by Shop-Script behind the scenes, thus allowing you to concentrate on other important problems:
Sitemap file
Webasyst framework, on which Shop-Script is based, automatically generates a sitemap.xml file. This file is used by search engine crawlers to learn fast about all the new products, categories, and info pages you have published in your online store.
The contents of sitemap.xml are always accessible at the URL of the form http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml even though there is no such file on the server. Do not create a file with this name in order not to prevent the framework from generating the Sitemap.
sitemap.xml is always generated automatically; therefore, you do not need to click on any special button to update it anywhere in the backend of Shop-Script or other Webasyst apps.
Schema.org
Basic (free) design themes delivered for Shop-Script generate the HTML markup in accordance with the microformat standards developed by Schema.org. HTML markup utilizing microformats enables search engines to determine the type of information being indexed more exactly and thus more exactly evaluate the indexed data. Such portions of information contained in storefront pages includes product descriptions, customer comments, product ratings, availability in stock, etc.
Breadcrumbs
Most pages of the storefront in Shop-Script contain the so-called breadcrumb links at the top, which point to higher navigation sections of the page a visitor is currently viewing. These links help online shoppers faster find their way around the store, and search engine crawlers — to analyze the storefront structure.
Human-readable URLs
All links in Shop-Script storefront have human-readable URLs, this also makes the storefront structure clearer to online shoppers and search engine crawlers. Shop-Script supports several types of URLs, you can select the desired type in the “Structure“ section of the Site app:
-
Natural
Product URLs: /category-name/subcategory-name/product-name/
Category URLs: /category-name/subcategory-name/ -
Mixed
Product URLs: /product-name/
Category URLs: /category/category-name/subcategory-name/subcategory-name/ -
Plain
Product URLs: /product/product-name/
Category URLs: /category/category-name/
None of these URL types is significantly better than others, but you can simply prefer one over the others depending on the way you have built your online catalog.
canonical
An important aspect of the search engine optimization is elimination of duplicate content. Duplicate content may be displayed on pages that are available at several URLs. For example, if you add only one parameter to the URL such as ?preview=1, this would also create a duplicate page with a different address and the same content.
To eliminate appearance of such duplicate pages, Shop-Script automatically adds a special tag with attribute canonical. When a storefront page is opened at its secondary URL; e.g., at a URL containing an additional parameter, the canonical attribute is added, which contains the primary URL of that page. This attribute “tells“ search engines that this secondary URL must not be indexed and that the primary URL must be indexed instead.
WWW or no WWW
Every website owner sooner or later realizes the necessity to set up a redirect from the WWW subdomain (e.g., <strong>www</strong>.yourdomain.com) to the main domain name (e.g., yourdomain.com) or vice versa. It is in most cases required to eliminate duplicate content, because otherwise two absolutely identical websites with different URLs will be available to search engines. With Webasyst framework, you can easily resolve this issue without having to search for complicated instructions on the Internet. Simply decide which of the two address versions you consider as the main one and enter it in your website settings in the Site app. After that, when the other address version is entered in a browser, the user will be automatically redirected to the main website address.
Cache
Shop-Script caches plenty of data to reduce the server load, including storefront templates and product image thumbnails. Any peak load which would have occurred, for example, due to extensive visiting of your website by search crawlers, will be neutralized to the maximum possible extent due to the use of cache. This useful feature will help you avoid interruptions in the operation of your online store caused by server failures, which always have negative effect on website rating in search engines.
However, we recommend that you do not fully rely on the caching feature of Shop-Script and choose a reliable web hosting company. You will hardly be able to save a couple of dollars this way but you can absolutely definitely ensure stable operation for your online store if you follow this advice.
0 comments
No comments yet.