Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 101
From Shopify Wiki
Shopify was built with Search Engine Optimization in mind. This article will cover some best practices when implementing SEO strategies for your store and for customizing your theme to take advantage of those strategies.
This article will go through the important elements of SEO, how to customize your theme’s code in order to implement the suggestions we make, and finally how you can help in getting your content discovered via search. Our friends over at SEOmoz have an excellent free beginner’s guide to SEO that is certainly worth checking out. If you are familiar with SEO concepts, feel free to skip ahead to the article on implementing SEO best practices into your liquid code.
Contents |
SEO Basics
In the world of SEO, content is king. If you want people to find you on the web, you need to get in front of the people who are looking for what you’re selling. This brings us to our first point...
Keywords
Keywords are the terms that people use to search for things on the web. As a shop owner, you want to know exactly what keywords your customers are using so that you can target them. As an example, let’s say that you are selling leather shoes; you need to know if people who might be searching for your product are looking for ‘leather shoes’, ‘dress shoes’, ‘leather boots’ or maybe even all of those. A useful tool to help you brainstorm and discover which are the most popular keywords is the Google Keyword tool. This tool helps you in determining which are the most popular keywords by comparing search volumes.
Always keep in mind that the more traffic the term gets, the more likely it will be harder to rank on the first Search Engine Results Page (SERP) with those. When selecting keywords you want to target, always keep your customer in mind as well. If there is a disparity between what you are ranking for and what your visitors are looking for, people will leave your site without buying. You may find that there are 10’s of thousands of keywords you want to rank for. In order to manage this you’ll need to prioritize and group your keywords into clusters that you can either optimize your current content for, or create new content for (pages, blog content).
On Page Optimization
Now that you know which keywords you are looking to target, you need your content to include those keywords. There are 4 primary places on any given web page where you will want to think about placing keywords: the page title, the meta description, the page’s main heading (the H1 or H2 HTML tags), and the page’s body content.
Page Title: The title tag is a very important element of on-page optimization. The <title> of the page is located in the <head> of your HTML code. Not only does the title tag appear as the clickable link on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), the actual content of the title is used by the search engines as one of the main factors in determining content relevancy. Some things to consider when creating your title tags are:
- Keyword placement: You will want to put the relevant keywords you are targeting in your page titles. The closer the placement of the most important keywords is to the front of the title, the more helpful they will be for ranking.
- Length: 70 characters is the maximum number of characters most search engines will display on their search results page. If you go over the limit, the title will have an ellipsis (...) appended to the end.
- Branding: Where you put your brand in your title tag really depends on whether or not you have a recognizable brand name (or if you are trying to build one). The first keyword spot in a title tag is valuable, so if your brand doesn't have any weight, it may be best to place it at the end. However, if people recognize your brand, having the brand name at the beginning will help with click-through rates from the SERP.
- Readability: Lastly, make sure your title tag is actually readable; you don’t want it appearing as a jumble of search engine optimized keywords; your customers won’t like that.
Meta Description:
While meta descriptions aren’t a ranking factor, they are a key component affecting user click-through rates from the SERP. The meta description should employ keywords intelligently, as keywords used in the search query will be highlighted in the meta description. When composing your descriptions, aim to create great ad copy. Check out this great DODOcase example to get an idea of compelling copy for a product site:
Keep in mind that there is a maximum recommended length for meta descriptions: search engines may truncate anything over 150 characters. You should also be mindful to avoid duplicate meta descriptions for the pages across your site. One last thing to look out for is to avoid the use of quotes, as the search engines will cut off all content following the quote marks. In general, you should avoid using non-alpha/numeric characters in your meta descriptions.
Page Heading & Content: It is important that you include the keywords for which you are looking to rank in the actual on-page text. Mentioning it two or three times will do. The last thing you want to do is ruin the flow of your on-page copy by peppering it too liberally with SEO keywords. Use targeted keywords wisely and sparingly. As an example, on your site’s product page, the heading would be something like the product name; whereas the content would be the product description.
Getting Found Via Search
Once you have all of your content set up and optimized for the keywords you’d like to target, your next job is to get found.
Sitemap
All Shopify stores automatically generate a sitemap.xml file that contains all your products, pages, collections, and blog posts. The sitemap file is located at http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml. Because this sitemap file is referenced from your store's robots.txt file, you do not need to manually submit it to Google and other search engines.
Links & Anchor Text
Links are the lifeblood of all serious SEO efforts, whenever possible you should be asking for, or seeking out ways to get links to your site. Anchor text – the actual text that contains the link in HTML – is also extremely helpful.
Links pass credibility to your site, in turn increasing your PageRank score. Anchor text is another indicator of what the content being linked to is all about. For example, if you are looking to get links to your food blog, you are better off having people link the term ‘‘best recipes’ as opposed to Punchfork or your actual site’s URL (www.punchfork.com).
Links and anchor text aren’t only important to external sites linking to you. The internal links of every page on your site also pass value and context (via the anchor text) to the page’s they link to. This means that careful usage of internal links can help you to better describe to the search engines what your site is about - or what you want to rank for!
Setting Up Your Theme for SEO
Shopify uses the Liquid templating system to generate the HTML code for your site. If you'd like to learn more about implementing SEO best practices into your theme, please refer to the SEO Guide for Theme Designers.