The aim of SEO is to get as much free website traffic (and therefore customers) out of search engines as possible. SEO is a science in itself and one that is different for each website and industry. SEO is rarely right the first time and it usually requires ongoing maintenance to make it really work. Our notes below discuss a general understanding of SEO and a range of suggestions which will work for all search engines, although in our own SEO of www.straightsell.com.au we only focus on our ranking in a Google search. If you get the largest search engine working, the others will follow...
NOTE: Typically, a company that provides SEO services focuses their efforts on the Home page of a website, improving the relevance of the text, titles, images, of the content on the Home page. Whereas, our structural optimisations focus on the product pages of the website, like the Product Details and Product List pages of the website.
Enhance SEO for your Website
While we do not offer SEO services, our websites are structurally optimised with SEO in mind.
- Google organic ranking is primarily associated with the text data on your website, while our website structure enables this indexing to occur efficiently
- How high you rank directly relates to how relevant the text on your website is to the search term being entered by the user
Assuming your site has been indexed on google there are a number of important factors to keep in mind:
- How relevant is the text on your site relative to the term being searched?
- The more generic the term on your site the more competition you will have with your competitors
e.g. a generic term will likely be used by many websites indexed on Google, the more unique the term used the more likely you will be the only indexed site using it
- Indexing bots will visit an active site more often than an inactive site
- An active site is defined as one that changes often, e.g. frequent news/blog articles and catalogue updates etc.
- This results in the google index being up to date
- Active sites will rank higher as they are 'alive' i.e. more relevant
- There are additional factors that provide a ranking increases such as:
- A mobile friendly (responsive) website
- A site that has an SSL certificate for the entire website
To satisfy the first factor:
- You should populate your website with keywords in all context relevant locations
- Context relevant is important as Google will actually rank you down if you populate the term over and over again on your home page (i.e. without context)
- The catalogue is one of the best places to max out your keywords as you can repeat them in multiple locations:
- Product Category the item is in
- Name of the item
- Description of the item
- By following this method you can add multiple relevant keywords to each product
To satisfy the second factor:
- Once you have populated the catalogue with keywords, it is likely the product data will not be very dynamic over time
- Therefore you will need to create news/blog articles that link to catalogue items or other areas that are loaded with keywords in order to update the index
- Google will index the links, which will load further keywords
At the end of the day, Google will rank the site with the most hits in their index for the term being searched as #1.
Keep in mind that Google can make changes to their search algorithms semi regularly.
Structural Optimisations
There are three locations where you can enhance SEO in Straightsell:
- Home Page
- Product Details Page
- Product List Page
The Home Page and other static pages are not optimised by default, this is not offered as a service.
- You can optimise these pages in the Straightsell Control Panel from Content Management > Web Pages
- You can add key words that will best optimise searches for your home page and other static pages from there, focus on the following three fields:
- page <title>, include the name of the page, and the company name
- meta name="description", include a description of the page, and the company name
- meta name="keywords", leave this blank
Our recommendation, include keyword relevant text, terms that people will actually search for, brand names and your top 10 selling product names in the meta name="description"
The Product Details Page is structurally optimised for SEO
- The URL path of the page is optimised to include the product code and product name in the path, /productcode/productname/pd.php
- The page <title> includes the product name and product category names and standard text "- Product Detail - " and company name
- The meta name="description" includes the product name and product description
- The meta name="keywords" includes the product name, product category names and company name
- Product Names have h1 search priority
- The main image is assigned an Alt Tag, with the Alt Title of the product name
Our recommendation, include keyword relevant text, terms that people will actually search for, and brand names in your product names and product descriptions.
The Product List Page is structurally optimised for SEO
- The URL path of the page is optimised to /category1/category2/category3/pl.php
- The page <title> includes the product category name and standard text "- Product List - " and company name
- The meta name="description" includes the product category name
- The meta name="keywords" includes the product category names and company name
- Product category names have h1 search priority
- Product category images (if shown) are assigned an Alt Tag, with the Alt Titles of the product category name
Our recommendation, include keyword relevant text, terms that people will actually search for, and brand names in your product category names.
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