Benefits of Search Engine Optimization
An overview of how SEO can take your site to the next level
Why is seo important?
Did you know that 93% of all internet activity starts with a search?
You’re going to have a tough time running an online store if users can’t discover your website through common search engines. SEO is of the utmost importance for your eCommerce store
While most eCommerce platforms today offer a variety of features that’ll help you optimize your store for Google, none are as optimized as Logicblock. Considering SEO involves several factors, including:
- UX
- Speed
- Meta Tags
- etc
Logicblock is equipped to handle all of them – and we handle them well. While most of our competitors only have the most basic SEO features, we are leading the industry.
LOGICBLOCK SEO FEATURES
YOUR OWN DOMAIN NAME
Importance: 10/10
Your domain name is the unique name by which your website can be found on the internet – typically the name of your business
Having your own domain name is absolutely the single MOST IMPORTANT factor to consider when you are setting up an online store.
Not all eCommerce platforms will allow you to use your own domain name. This can result in the error of accepting a free branded subdomain when launching your store. Some examples are:
- shop.yourbusiness.com
- yourwebsite.shop.com
- outpost.com/yourecommercestore
- yourstore.ecommerce.com
Aside from losing return customers and appearing less professional, all inbound links pointing to a website with a subdomain will primarily benefit your eCommerce Solution Provider… Not you!
With our solution, this has never been an issue. Our clients can use whatever domain name they own. Their domain, their website.
Independent Navigation Links
Importance: 10/10
The text that appears for your products and product categories in the navigation menu of your site.
For SEO Purposes, it is preferable to have independent control of the navigation links.
With Logicblock, you have infinite possibility when it comes to editing this portion of your pages. You have complete control over your menus, what they say and where they link to.
INDEPENDENT PAGE TITLES
Importance: 10/10
Text that appears in the tab section at the top of the browser.
Key Search Terms are particularly important for Page Titles when the search term or keyword is placed at the beginning of the Page Title.
Our platform DOES NOT automatically generate page titles using the same names as the products and product categories on the store.
INDEPENDENT META DESCRIPTIONS
Importance: 9/10
On Google, the Meta Description is the text that appears under your listing title.
Meta descriptions can have a considerable impact on making you stand out from other websites with similar content. This does not technically impact your position in the results, but it may have an effect on whether your site gets clicked on or your competitor’s.
From a practical perspective, the meta description does affect your search ranking, since more people are going to click through, increasing your relevance and popularity on the Search Engine.
Logicblock does not automatically use the description or content shown on the page to create a default Meta description. You have the option to independently control the text that appears on your Google Listing.
Typically, the information that would be most suitable for grabbing the attention of a potential visitor when they are comparing your site to someone else’s on Google will be different from the text you want to display on the page, once they have clicked into your site.
INDEPENDENT IMAGE ALT TAGS
Importance: 3/10
When a search engine is unable to view an image, an ALT tag is used to describe the image to search engines using text.
ALT tags do not have a particularly strong correlation to your ranking in google, but they may have an impact on the your image’s appearance in Google’s Image Search results, which CAN bring in additional traffic.
Independent H1 Headings
Importance: 3/10
The H1 tag is typically designated as the main heading that appears on your product and category pages
There is a strong SEO advantage when your H1 tags are relevant to what people are searching for.
If you stock a product that matches a search term used by your prospective customers e.g. “Eco-Friendly Green Paper” it would be more beneficial if the H1 heading/tag on the page included the same keyword. With Logicblock, you are more than capable of accomplishing this.
CANONICAL URLS
Importance: 7/10
If a page may be found in more than one location, a Canonical URL can be used as the original address of that page.
For online stores, it’s fairly normal for the same product to be listed under multiple URLs. A product can be under multiple categories, for example: a pen could be under “Office Supplies” and also under” School Supplies” – this results int he same product page technically appearing under two different URLs.
Search Engines will see these duplicated pages with the same content and might penalize those pages and prevent your page from ranking well in the search results. A site that contains a lot of duplicated content might also be a point of contention for Search Engines.
To fix this, search engines provide the “REL CANONICAL” tag, which enables you to designate which URL is the preferred version of the page.
INTEGRATED BLOGGING PLATFORMS
Importance: 10/10
A way to create and publish blogs without having to leave your solution.
The number of links pointing to your site can have a direct influence on how prominently your site appears in Google’s search results. Other factors, like quality of links, can also play a role here. The idea here is that if people like a website, they’ll start sharing and linking to it. The more inbound links you have going to your website, the more reputable google will consider your site.
It’s highly unlikely that other sites will want to link directly to your product pages. The best way to accomplish this is by having a good blog that contains current, engaging and shareable content.
SOCIAL SHARING BUTTONS
Importance: 8/10
Buttons that allow your website visitors to easily share your pages on social media
Attention spans are short and the way most people find out about anything these days is through a social media feed. Having these buttons on your website makes it really easy for visitors to share your content, which is important if you want more people to discover you who aren’t already familiar with your brand.
AUTO XML SITEMAPS
Importance: 9/10
A file located on your server to help search engines find and index your content.
An XML sitemap is a file located on your web server to help search engines find and index your content.
Note that the XML sitemap differs from an HTML sitemap which is designed to help human visitors find the content on your website.
Maintaining an XML Site for your storefront is not something you want to be managing manually. Our XML Sitemap Generator comes at no additional charge and can be used to automatically generate a Sitemap in moments. It’s very easy to use and you can alter the settings so that it comes out however you’d like.
Once you have your sitemap, you can submit it to Google through the Google Webmaster Tools module.
YOUR OWN IP ADDRESS
Importance: 2/10
An IP address is a unique number that represents the location of your website on the internet.
Technically you can access a site either by it’s domain name OR its IP address. Typically, it’s easier to remember the domain name rather than the string of numbers that is the IP address.
You do not want to be sharing your IP address with another website. Here’s why:
Sharing the IP address of another website could drastically affect the performance and reliability of your website. If you site is unavailable because of this, you could suffer from ranking drops on Google for performance-related issues.
If the other website that is sharing your IP address does something illegal or unethical, that could be reflected on you by Google and they could penalize you.
On Logicblock, you get your own IP address, no sharing.
301 REDIRECTS
Importance: 3/10
A 301 redirection is a command used to redirect a browser or search engine from one URL to another.
When a product gets removed from your online store because it wasn’t available, you don’t want the webpage that was there previously to be a 404. That means that if someone has your URL for a product saved and they access it from their bookmarks or an external link, it takes them to a page that no longer exists.
With Logicblock, you can automatically redirect your unavailable products to other products that you designate. It’s really easy to set up and will prevent your customers from reaching that dreaded 404 page or from losing rank on key search terms in Google.
