Search Engine Optimization
Introduction
Search Engine Optimization, abbreviated as SEO, is the process of making a website show up on web search results. A website needs to be optimized continuously for it to appear in the organic rankings of a search engine, such as Google. The better the quality of a website, the higher the ranking.
In this document, you will learn about the following SEO options
Robots.txt
Search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and many more use crawlers (a program or script) to find web pages that are new, old, and modified. These crawlers read the content of the pages and accordingly create entries for the search engine index. Robots.txt is a file that instructs the crawlers which resources to read, and which ones to ignore.
A typical robots.txt looks like this:
Case 1: If you want all the crawlers to visit all the resources on your website.
User-agent: *
Allow: /
Case 2: If you want only one crawler (say Googlebot) to visit all the resources.
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /
Case 3: If you don't want a specific crawler (say LinkedInBot) to visit a specific resource (say /photos/).
User-agent: LinkedInBot
Disallow: /photos/
Case 4: If you don't want crawlers to access any resource.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Recommended Sample Code
This is the recommended Robots.txt content for your website.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /dashboard/
Disallow: /order/
Disallow: /address_book/
Disallow: /return/
Disallow: /wishlist/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /thankyou/
Sitemap: https://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:
User-agent: Googlebot-image
Disallow:
You can specify permissions (allow/disallow) for more than one user-agent (crawler) in the robots.txt file.
Custom Tags
You can create tags that describe the content of a page. Unlike other tags, the custom tags appear only in the source code of the web page. For example, Facebook seeks a domain verification before linking ads to your website. It provides a custom tag to add within the <head> section of your page's source code. For doing this, you can refer the below steps.
- Click Add New Meta Tag.
- Enter any name and paste the tag provided by Facebook.
- Click Save
Similarly, you can add custom tags to specify the character set, SEO keywords, and many more.
Click here to learn how you can use custom meta tags to get your site verified by Google.
Application Details
In Fynd Platform, you can add a title and description within Application Details. Search engines will show the meta title and meta description of your website when people search for your website.
- Meta title
Whether a user clicks your website or not, depends on how you have constructed the title of your website. Therefore, it should be written by keeping the user's perspective in mind.
- Meta description
Search engines may define their own meta description for your website. To avoid this, you should write a meta description that includes all the relevant keywords and the purpose of your website.
No matter how long the title and description is, search engines will show only upto 50-60 characters of the title, and 155-160 characters of the description in the search results. Therefore, you should consider adding the most relevant keywords in the beginning.
Self Canonical Tags
In SEO, canonical tags are used to mark or point the preferred version of a website page when there are different versions of that page accessible through different URLs. As the name suggests, a self-canonical tag is the tag that points to itself, implying that a particular page is the preferred version of itself, despite it may be accessible through different URLs.
Example, suppose you have a product page on your website that can be accessed through multiple URLs, such as:
https://pc.fyndstore.co/product/black-tapered-panthttps://pc.fyndstore.co/category/trackpants/product/black-tapered-panthttps://pc.fyndstore.co/product/black-tapered-pant?source=google
Upon enabling self-canonical tags as shown below, a canonical tag will be added to HTML code of that page (Refer Figure 7). It gives suggestion to search engines that the page at https://pc.fyndstore.co/product/black-tapered-pant is the preferred version, although it may be accessible through different URLs.
Learn more about Canonical Tags.
Sitemap
A sitemap contains information about the pages, videos, files on your website, and the relationship between them.
Search engines like Google largely find web pages through links. If your website is new and has few external backlinks, then a sitemap becomes crucial for helping a search engine find pages on your website.
On Fynd Platform, you can automatically generate, enable and customize a site map.
Go to sitemaps and add an XML containing the following links that will be crawled by search engines:
- /brands
- /collections
- /categories (All levels - L1, L2 and L3)
- /pages (All custom pages)
- /blogs
- /faq
- /about-us
- /locate-us
- /terms-and-conditions
- /privacy-policy
Example:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /dashboard/
Disallow: /order/
Disallow: /address_book/
Disallow: /return/
Disallow: /wishlist/
Disallow: /cart/
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /thankyou/
Sitemap: https://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow:
User-agent: Googlebot-image
Disallow:
In the above example of robots.txt, replace www.yourwebsite.com with the URL of your domain. In case you have created your own sitemap externally, you can specify its location in robots.txt directly.
You can also validate your XML by clicking the Validate button. The results for the same will be displayed in the Results section.
You can check the content of your website's sitemap by appending /sitemap.xml to your URL.
Schema
It allows seller to use JSON-LD schema at the application level to improve search results and visibility. Schema consists of tags or microdata added to your HTML, making it easier for search engines to understand and present your page in search results.
- Go to the Sales Channel > Settings > General > SEO > Schema.
- Click Create to make a new schema or select the existing schema to modify it.
- Select the page for which you want to create the schema from the dropdown and add the respective content.
- In the Details section on the right, enter the title and description.
Other SEO Options
Click the following links to know more about: