SEO Overview: Search Engine Optimization || Shopify Help Center 2019

When you’re trying to sell online you havean important problem to solve: how do you get customers to find your store? People who find your online store in a searchengine are probably looking for products like yours, so they’re more likely to buy something.

You can use search engine optimization, orSEO, to improve the search engine ranking for your store and help customers find yourproducts.

This means taking steps in your Shopify adminto help search engines understand your store and trust your content, and increase the chancesthat your store populates when potential customers search the web.

Subscribe now for upcoming videos with step-by-stepinstructions on optimizing your store’s SEO.

For now, a quick overview outlining multipleways to optimize your store’s SEO.

1.

Consider adding keywords to your Shopify store.

Keywords should match typical search queriesthat people enter in search engines.

For example, a person might search for blueshoes in Canada.

The keywords in this search would be blueshoes and Canada.

To make your store appear higher in searchresults, you should try to find out which keywords your customers might use to findyour products, and then make sure to use those keywords when you’re writing product descriptionsand other content for your store.

Find ways to use keywords in the followingfour places: Page titlesImage ALT text Meta descriptionsPage content .

Now, a little more about how to add keywordsin those places.

Page titles: Search engines compare the titletag with your page content to determine whether the page title matches what the page is about.

Meta descriptions: a meta description is thetext that is shown in search engine results after the title tag.

You can set the meta description for webpages, product pages, collection pages, and blog posts in Shopify.

ALT text: Search engines can read the textin your content, but can’t read the images.

You can use descriptive alternative text tohelp search engines find your content.

Alt text is also an important accessibilityfeature for people who have visual impairments.

A page’s body content: When you write contentfor a product or collection description, webpage, or blog post, use readable, unique phrasesthat include some of your keywords.

2.

Another SEO strategy is optimizing the sitestructure for your online store.

In general, when you’re selling with a Shopifyonline store, you don’t need to worry about your site structure, because Shopify has SEOfeatures built-in.

However, you can do a few things yourselfto optimize your site structure for search engines.

Optimize your online store menus: see thevideo linked above to learn more about best practices with menus.

Use descriptive filenames for your images- Before you upload your images to Shopify, rename the files to something describing theimage.

Search engines won’t understand what theimage is, unless you tell it.

Be sure to edit the image’s file name beforeyou upload it to Shopify.

Use descriptive link text for internal links- You can link to different parts of your site when you write body content for a page.

The text in the link should describe the pagethat you’re linking to, because search engines try to match the link with the page.

For example, this blog post links to a yogamat product.

Instead of highlighting the entire sentenceto link, highlight “yoga mat” because that text describes the content on the productpage.

3.

Another SEO strategy is submitting your store’ssitemap to Google.

A sitemap is a list of all the pages on yourwebsite that a customer could navigate to starting from your homepage.

Submitting your store’s sitemap to GoogleSearch Console helps Google find and index valuable pages on your site.

This means thatyour store populates in Google search results, potentially bringing in more customers.

Before you submit your sitemap, you must firstverify your site with Google to ensure you are the correct owner.

Check out the videos linked below to see step-by-stepinstructions on submitting a sitemap and verifying your site with Google.

4.

Hide a particular page from search engines.

Search engines like Google constantly crawlthe internet in search of new data.

A file called robots.

txt , is a text filethat tells search engines what pages of your site to index.

The text file also blocks page content thatmight otherwise reduce the effectiveness of your SEO strategy.

Although you can't edit the content of yourstore's robots.

txt file, you can still hide pages that aren’t included in the file.

See the link in the description for more detailson hiding pages.

For frequently asked questions about SEO, check out the link in the description.

Subscribe now for upcoming videos on how tooptimize your store’s SEO with step-by-step instructions.

If you still have questions, comment belowor contact the Shopify support team directly.

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