Google and other search engines are one of the potential sales channel. So it's important to get your products indexed.
SEO is about how to make your store indexed by search engines (Google and others), to improve look of the pages snippets in search results, to make your store pages appear higher in the search results list etc. Google indexing is essential for good sales.
Store pages can be natively indexed by Google still there are steps you can make to optimize your site and your store for search engines.
In this article:
SEO fields
Online store forms metadata based on the product name and description. But search engines generally truncate snippets longer than 160 characters. So it is best to keep meta descriptions between 150 and 160 characters.
With SEO fields you can create separate titles and descriptions for your products that will form the metadata that will be seen to the search engines.
You can fill in SEO fields for every product in your Control Panel → Catalog → Products, Product edit page → SEO tab
Clean SEO URLs
SEO friendly clean URLs feature should boost for the indexation of your website.
What's so great about it?
The notorious ‘#’ sign is gone at last, and the relief is quite understandable, as Google, of example, claims URLs without that sign are better indexed. The new URLs also have fewer extra characters like '/', '~' or '!', so the page address is better for SEO. The URLs now look cleaner and better, and they are available to all merchants for free.
How to manually enable clean SEO URLs?
If you have a custom website or a website built on CMS, for which the clean SEO URLs are not yet available in one click, it will still be possible to enable them manually! This will require a few changes in the integration code and server setup, so you will probably need a developer's help, if you decide to make that change.
SEO tips
There isn't any pre-written instructions on how to succeed in SEO with any technology. SEO is always an experiment. The major search engines will teach you what content they expect, but they will never say: "Do exactly this and you are #1 in our rankings" - you have to find and refine that knowledge yourself (or find an expert). Tomorrow the thing that are likely to work may change and you then will have to change everything accordingly. However, there are some measures that in most cases lead to better SEO. Here are some of them we'd like to recommend:
Know what customers look for
Find out where your visitors come from and what exactly they search before they get to your site. With understanding of what your customers look for, you can further optimize your site content in order to provide both your potential customers and search engines robots with more relevant information, which will more likely be useful for them. Such investigation can be done with the help of Google Analytics – analytics reports will show you which keywords are driving search traffic to your site and to which URLs. Please find the details on how to setup Google Analytics in your store here: Google Analytics . Furthermore, with the knowledge of what keywords or search phrases your customers use, you can attract more visitors with setting up a Google AdWords campaign.
Stay social
Besides search engines, there are many possible traffic sources, which are often proven to be very effective. One of them – social networks – is getting more and more popular nowadays, so we'd highly recommend use it in your business. Please find more details: Social features .
Other ways to attract customers and get traffic
Social networks
Social networks are getting more and more popular nowadays, so we'd highly recommend use them in your business. There is a lot of ways you can get the traffic from social networks. Here is some of them:
a) Socialize and find an audience who cares about what you say and what you sell
Not only will they become your buyers, they will also evangelize your product or services to a friend, family or online social channel for you. Create a Facebook page representing your store (a business page) or a Twitter account and share your thoughts/updates/products/promotions there. You can share your products in FB and Twitter right from your control panel: How to share my products in Facebook and Twitter
b) Make it easy to buy your products right from the places of social activity
You can install your store on several storefronts simultaneously so, for example, if you think your blog becomes more crowdy place than your product site, just place your integration codes on the blog and your storefront will appear there. Another great approach is to add your store directly to your business page on Facebook so that your customers will be able to purchase from you right on Facebook. More details: Install your store on Facebook
c) Engage your customers to share your products with their friends and subscribers in social networks attracting more and more customers
Online store supports many social share/like buttons to let your customers share the product they like. The buttons can be embedded in your storefront in one click: Share buttons
d) Make it easy for your customers to discuss your products in social networks
People like talking about things they are going to buy or sharing their thoughts about the things they have recently bought. Make it possible for your customers to post reviews and discuss your products right in your store and on their pages in social networks with the help of these built-in features:
- Facebook comments
- Sharing purchase
- Asking a friend for advice before purchasing a product
Theme blogs and forums
Take part in theme discussions on the web sites where you can write about your store and products. For example, if you sell baby products, forums for mothers is most likely the place your potential customers can be reached at: help people to find and choose products they want, give a piece of advice and provide a link to your store. Another strategy is writing in the blogs allowing guest-posting: if your think some particular blog's subscribers could be your customers, it would be good idea to share your experience and mention your store in this blog.
Ads
People may say nobody likes ads. Still, the fact is ads work. There are many advertising services on the web, which you can use for your business. One of the most popular and reliable is Google Adwords – you may want to use it for your store.
FAQ
How long does it take for Google to index my store?
If nothing prevents search engines to index your store, sooner or later, it will be indexed and the store pages will be listed among the search results. However it usually takes from several days to 2-3 weeks for search robots to complete indexation of your site and to "find" all your product pages. If that doesn't happen and you think something is wrong, please follow these recommendations:
1. Please make sure the site and the store page themselves are available for indexation by search engines.
The Google AJAX crawling approach described in this article helps your products and categories to be indexed by search engines. But if the store page itself (or even the whole site ) cannot be indexed for some reason, then your products may not be indexed. There could be many reasons:
- something on your server prevents search robots from indexing your site or some of its parts (e.g. restriction rules 'robots.txt' file or malformed .htaccess)
- search engines don't see your site or store page, for example, in case of absence of external links to it. You can check whether your store page is indexed by Google, see this instruction.
2. Try to force indexation of your store.
In general, linking is the main key of being indexed by search engines. In order to force indexation of your store you will need to place a link to your store page (or even to particular product pages) somewhere on your site. Also, having external links to your store somewhere on the web is good for indexation. Moreover, the amount of inbound links to your store and its products is one of the most powerful factors influencing the position of the store pages in search results. Also, they usually recommend creating a sitemap and submit it to the search engines of interest (for example to Webmaster tools for Google).
How can I check which of my products are indexed by Google?
It may happen that your store's pages are not listed among the first 10, 20 or 30 search results when you search by some particular phrase. Thus it may be difficult to check whether your products are indexed at all. In such cases, try to find your products in Google using a more specific search queries like this one:
site:yoursite.com/store.php
In the query above, replace 'yoursite.com/store.php' with the actual URL of your store page. Such a search query will limit the results to show your product pages only, so you will know whether your products are indexed by Google or not.