You can use search engine optimization, orSEO, to improve the search engine ranking for your store and help customers find yourproducts.
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One way to optimize your store’s SEO isby adding keywords to your store pages.
A keyword is a specific word or phrase thatdescribes the content of a page.
Keywords are the words that people might enterin search engines when searching for products or businesses like yours.
For example, a person might search for a blackt-shirt in Canada.
The keywords in this search would be black, t-shirt and Canada.
To make your store appear higher in the searchresults, try to find out which keywords your customers might use to find your products, and use those keywords in your content.
You can use online tools to get keyword ideasand to find out how often a keyword is used in a search.
This example shows the extension “Keywordseverywhere” which shows the keyword search volume, cost per click and competition data.
See the description for links for keywordsearch tools.
After you’ve identified your keywords, it’stime to add them to your store.
The first task is to set a title and descriptionfor your online store.
From your Shopify admin, click Online Store, then click Preferences.
The title and meta description is what customerssee for your online store in search results.
Start by entering a title using keywords thatrelate to your business.
For example, AlyAthletics sells fitness clothesand athletic accessories for women.
The keywords here are fitness, clothes, athletic, accessories and women.
So a descriptive title could be “Fitnessclothes and athletic accessories for women”.
The title will appear as a clickable linkin search engine results.
Next, create a meta description taking thesame steps.
A meta description is the brief bit of textthat shows in search engine results after the title you just created.
Again, you want the description to use keywordsthat describe your store’s business while featuring highlights of what a customer canexpect if they click.
This example mentions featured products andsizes available while also using natural, readable phrases.
When you’re done, click Save.
Editing the page title and meta descriptionis something you can do for all pages in your Shopify store.
To do this on a product page, click Products.
Then click on a product title.
Scroll to the area titled Search engine listingpreview, and click Edit.
By default, the SEO preview appearing hereis pulled from title and description at the top of the page.
You can edit the page title and meta descriptionusing keywords that are specific to this product.
In the URL and handle section, you can editthe web address.
In most cases, you won't need to make changesto the web address.
If you do make changes, then make sure thatyou set up URL redirects from the old web address.
Next, you want to add keywords to your storeimages.
Search engines can read the text in your content, but can’t read the images.
You can use descriptive alternative text, also known as alt text, to help search engines find your content.
Alt text is also an important accessibilityfeature for people who have visual impairments.
If you’re on a product page, hover overthe image and click the three dots, then Edit alt text.
Use readable phrases that describe what appearsin the image, not what you want someone to think about the image.
For this product, blue polyester t-shirt isentered.
You can set alt text for a product image, collection featured image, or a blog post featured image.
To edit a collection’s image, click Collections.
Then open a collection to edit.
Beside Collection image, click Edit, thenclick Edit image alt text.
From here, enter keywords using the same stepsas outlined before.
Click Save to finish.
If you have any blog posts, take the samesteps to edit those images.
You also want to add keywords to the mainheading at the top of the page – also known as an H1 header.
Shopify automatically uses the title thatyou enter here to generate the H1 header for the page.
Search engines use H1 headers to determinewhat the page content is about.
When you enter a page title, include yourmain keywords so the H1 header automatically includes them.
The steps listed in this video can be doneon multiple pages in your Shopify store.
Be sure to edit titles, meta descriptions, headers and images all throughout your site for best results.
It’s important to remember that changesmade in Shopify do not immediately reflect in search results.
Google periodically updates search engineresults by crawling websites for new content.
You see these changes after Google has crawledyour pages to index them again.
To speed the process up, you can submit yoursitemap to Google.
Watch the video “How to submit a sitemap”to see step-by-step instructions.
Subscribe now for weekly videos and be sureto comment below with your thoughts on SEO.
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