Your Online Store SEO Settings

Your Online Store is optimized for Google by default. Here's what's done to make SEO a priority at the Online Store. 

Sitemap

A sitemap is an XML file that contains a list of the site pages. A multi-level menu (Home → Category → Subcategory1 → Subcategory2 → Product) takes Google a long time to index new products because they are deep in the site structure. New pages and products are indexed faster with sitemap since search engines check sitemaps every day.

You can check your sitemap by adding /sitemap.xml part to your Online Store URL in browser’s address bar. It is already submitted to Google internally via robot.txt file, but if you want search engines to find it faster, you may want to submit your sitemap to Google manually via your own Search Console.

Note: New pages appear on the sitemap in about a day. 

Microdata

Microdata is a set of special tags on the site code. They help search engines to see what information on the site is more important. This helps index the products and categories better. Online Store uses microdata by Schema.org to annotate product information and adds it to all store pages automatically. This product information appears in search results.

Static copies of pages

Online Store is a SaaS solution created using JavaScript. It is added to any website as lines of JavaScript code. The site source code does not contain any data about products. Instead, it is generated dynamically “on the go” when a visitor opens the page.  

Search engines do not always index dynamic websites well. To ensure they index your Online Store, a static HTML copy is created for every product and category page in your store and gives this copy to a search engine. This helps Google and other search engines index your store as if it were a static HTML site. As a result, all product and category data show in search engine results. 

Clean links

Services that use JavaScript have hashbangs (#!) in their links. Online Store displays all store links in a clean and understandable way:

Clean, clutter-free links are better indexed and more quickly show up in search results at search engines.

ALT-tags for images

ALT is a tag used to explain images to search engines. Online Store creates ALT-tags for images automatically with the same text as the product title:

Adding keywords using ALT-tags helps search engines index your site more effectively. 

Direct search engine indexing

Search engines index all the Online Stores by default.  Do you want more organic search traffic to your online store? We bet that the answer is yes. In this case, it all starts with making your store visible to the search engines which is the indexation. Since Google is now capable of indexing rendered content dynamically, your Online Store store, being a dynamic web application, can natively show up in the search results. 

In a while, after the search bots crawl on your website, your catalog pages will show up in the search results and include the markup for improved product details. Here are the best practices to improve the indexation of your Online Store:

• Verify your website in Google Search Console and submit a sitemap to boost the indexing process.
• Use clean SEO-friendly URLs for your store pages.
• Allow search bots a few weeks to crawl through your catalog pages and include them in the search results for relevant queries.

You can check whether or not Google has indexed your store pages and, in the meanwhile, focus on optimizing your store for better search rankings. 

Native indexing by Google

Since Google is now capable to render and index JavaScript content on website pages, it is natively indexed by Google.

However, Google carries the JavaScript indexing according to a special algorithm, which is more time and resource consuming, compared to that for static HTML pages:

• When Googlebot crawls on a website page for the first time, it indexes the HTML content. At this point, it can only detect that the page has some dynamic JavaScript content.
• Next, the crawler transfers the page data into Google’s service that renders the page, like modern browsers do, and analyzes the dynamic content to use it later for page ranking.
• Google then puts the page on queue for the second indexation. And only after the post rendering indexation, dynamic JavaScript content can show up in the search results.

Note: your Online Store pages, being dynamically rendered, appear in Google index not as fast as static ones. You can quickly check what pages Google already indexed and monitor the indexing progress.