Search Engine Optimized and Search Engine Friendly are the qualities that intertwine in a good webstore. On the face of it, it’s rather difficult to see the difference between them, yet it is there, and it is rather significant.
SEO is an ongoing process that improves a website’s visibility, content quality, and user experience. SEF focuses on the technical foundation that helps search engines crawl, understand, and index a website, but these improvements should also be reviewed and updated as the store grows and search technologies change.
While the goal of SEO is to make your store customer-friendly, SEF’s aim is to make it most accessible to web search engines. Therefore, SEF focuses on technical aspects like site architecture, URLs, structures, and HTML code, and is to be performed jointly by programmers and designers.
As we made it clear what SEF is, you’ve probably begun wondering what you can do at the initial stages of online store development to make it search engine friendly. Here are three aspects you must pay great attention to:
Search engine crawlers
Content and indexing
URLs and construction
Search engine crawlers
To discover and index new information that constantly emerges on the Internet, search engines use web crawlers – an automated program that browses the web. Apart from indexing, they can be used for link check, HTML code validation, gathering email addresses, etc., but today we will focus on the following: how to make search engine crawlers see your website?
- Website structure. Every page on your webstore should have a part in a certain architecture, consisting of categories and subcategories. Otherwise, crawlers simply won’t find the way to the page, and your content, however search engine optimized, informative, and useful it is, won’t be listed in search engine indexes.
- Remember that crawlers can’t see pages containing submission forms. It happens because such forms usually require a login and password, making them inaccessible to crawlers.
- HTML links. Modern search engines can crawl and render JavaScript, but websites that rely heavily on client-side rendering may still face indexing issues if important content is not accessible to crawlers. Using clean HTML structures and ensuring important pages are available without complex scripts can improve search engine accessibility. Therefore, simple HTML links are a better solution.
- Links overflow. A search engine can index only a certain number of links on a given page, and if this amount is surpassed, it will recognize the page as spam. So don’t make your page too dense with links.
- Robots.txt. This text file is embedded in a page to flag the search engine that it is allowed to crawl on it. You can use robots.txt to control which parts of your website crawlers can access. However, robots.txt does not prevent a page from appearing in search results in every situation. For pages that should not be indexed, use appropriate indexing directives such as the noindex meta tag. This way, you can protect sensitive information you don’t want to see in search results.
Make your content indexable
Search engines don’t see and read your website the same as your visitors do. Where customers see text blocks, pictures, animation, and beautiful web page layout, search engine crawlers see a mixture of words and code. To improve your webstore’s position in search results, make sure your text content is in HTML format. What comes to visual and other non-text elements, I can recommend the following formatting solutions:
- Alt text for images. Instead of a picture, a search engine crawler sees its alt text attributes, so fill in the alt text bar with a description containing your keywords for Google and other engines to see it.
- Video and audio transcript. You can’t translate such content into HTML, yet you can transcribe it into text. This way, search engines will identify it correctly and rank it higher.
- Search boxes or breadcrumbs structure. This way, you will kill two birds with one stone: provide your visitors with better navigation capabilities and embed in the site structure links that the search engine spiders will discover.
- Flash or Java plugins. Unfortunately, crawlers will never see your gorgeous, informative website if you created it in Flash or Java. Add a special Flash or Java plugin to translate such data into a format readable by search engines.
Want to explore how search engines see your website to evaluate the results of your SEF and make further improvements? Browseo.net allows you to see the insides of your website for free.
How to construct URLs
If you think about it, URLs appear in a number of very important to for your Search Engine Friendliness:
- in the search results, affecting the website’s position
- in the address bar or a website, and though it doesn’t make any significant difference here, you can’t help but agree that seeing a messy, long link is off-putting.
- in text, when a certain page is referenced
Taking into account URL significance, I would advise you to take a hard look at the links on your website and make use of some of the following advice:
- Short and sweet. It is especially relevant to an online shop, since there can be numerous categories and subcategories of produce. Make them as short and precise as possible to make links look neat.
- Use words only. Don’t leave your link looking all messy like http/website.com/124-b-m56/ – WordPress, Wix, and other solutions allow you to change it to anything you need.
- Don’t overuse keywords. Focus on one key notion and use it in the URL – don’t make it heavy with words that don’t correspond directly with the page.
- Separate words with hyphens. For URLs, you can separate words with any sign, like a “+” or a “%”, but the thing is, they don’t always reflect correctly. It’s better not to risk and separate all words with “-”
This is all for Search Engine Friendly pages. If you want to learn about SEO for Ecommerce, follow the link to our article SEO for Ecommerce: Search Engine Optimization and Keyword Research. If you have a question or something to add, feel free to leave us a comment.