How is SEO set up?
Purpose
To highlight the key technical tasks associated with setting up search engine optimization (SEO) as part of your standard WebShop set up and configuration.
Recommendation
Read this in conjunction with Understanding SEO in Aphix WebShop, which explains how SEO works in WebShop.
Introducing terms and concepts used in this article
Term | Definition |
|---|---|
Crawler | a piece of software used to search the Internet looking for new content and sites. |
Search engine optimization | (SEO), a method of attracting more organic traffic to your website (in this case, WebShop) by making it appear higher on search engine results pages. |
Search engine result page | (SERP), a list of ranked results which are returned based on search terms you enter into a search engine. |
Uniform resource locator | (URL), the address of a website. |
More information
WebShop has been set up to support optimization of your rankings in searches carried out on search engines.
Our software platform hosts a robots.txt file. A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can access on your site. The robots.txt file is stored on our platform, and used by all our merchants. As a result, we include rules in it that are applied to all our merchants according to best practice. As a result, it is not possible for you to edit this file. We recommend that you either remove pages from the menu or require a login for pages you do not wish to be indexed by search engine crawlers.
Your domain name refers to your uniform resource locator (URL). We ensure that your WebShop has a single domain name. This means that only the https:// version of your site is indexed, and other versions are redirected appropriately. For example, myshop.com is redirected to https://www.myshop.com. In addition to your actual domain name, you also have access to a “.aphix.software“ domain name. We ensure that the “.aphix.software“ domain name is not indexed. This reduces the chance of a search engine crawler finding and marking your content as duplicate. Having duplicate content may result in key WebShop pages not ranking highly on SERPs.
Each WebShop page contains header information, which is metadata required to process the page content correctly. We include ‘do not index’ directives in the header information for pages that you do not wish to index. Examples of such pages include login and checkout pages. We include ‘no follow’ directives in the header information for pages that are created as a result of you or your customers sorting products or adding products to the Cart. This reduces the chance of a of a search engine crawler finding and marking your content as duplicate. Having duplicate content may result in key WebShop pages not ranking highly on SERPs.
Key points
WebShop uses a number of strategies to support SEO in your WebShop.
These include
redirecting your domain name to a single instance,
automatically include a robots.txt file, which applies to all WebShop instances and is written according to best practice,
including ‘do not index’ and ‘no follow' directives in header information on appropriate WebShop page
These strategies are designed to improve your SEO by reducing the chance of a search engine crawler finding and marking your content as duplicate. Having duplicate content may result in key WebShop pages not ranking highly on SERPs.