Introduction to Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has now become an important factor in contemporary digital marketing landscape. We live in an age where search engines are used to serve millions of user daily looking to answer their questions and find solutions of their problems.
If you are building any new site or any e-commerce store, SEO can play an important role to help in increasing the visibility of our site on search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, bring customers to your site and contribute in the growth of your business. With the help of SEO strategies, search engine algorithms are able to identify relevant details about the page and determine its ranking accordingly.
Types of SEO
There are two important factors that search engines consider while ranking any page.
- Onsite SEO – Search Engines will crawl keywords, meta tags, titles, images, content etc. on the web page.
- Offsite SEO – Search Engines will see the information of your web pages on other sites. i.e. how your website is referred to from other online sources.
Valuable SEO Tips for NetSuite SuiteCommerce Advanced Webstore
There are many tools available to ensure that the pages of your site are optimized as per the guidelines recommended by search engines. By using the tools and techniques listed below you can improve your SuiteCommerce Advanced website SEO ranking.
1. Images
The following are the two important factor for Image Files.
Image Alternate Text – The alternate text helps search engines in describing the image. The alternate text is displayed when due to any reason the image failed to load. In NetSuite SuiteCommerce Webstore you can edit the Image file and can add the alt text in it.
Image File Names – SEO experts recommends to use descriptive image file names for your NetSuite SuiteCommerce Webstore. It helps the search engines to search & index images. In SCA your image file names can match your item identifier. The item identifier can be any one of the following:
- Display Name/Code
- UPC Code
- URL Component
2. Content Delivery & Static Pages
In SCA you can create static pages either using CMS feature of SCA or using Content Delivery feature of SCA. If you are using the CMS feature then you can edit any page using CMS feature and add the meta tags information for that page. It is necessary to add the following mentioned tags on your Home and Category pages.
The following page elements must be set on each page of site for on-page optimization. Search engines uses these keywords and meta tags to search the pages of your Webstore.
- Page Title: This title appears in the browser title bar. Google normally displays the first 55-60 characters of page title.
- Meta Keywords and Meta Description: Used to help search engines find your page for relevant targeted keywords. Recommended character limit of description is around 155 characters.
- Page Header: This content replaces the existing header for the page.
- Addition to <head> field: Enter any information you want to add to the <head> HTML element for this page.
3. Adding Descriptive URLs and Meta Tags for Detail Pages
The Product Detail Page URL can be added to the URL Component field in NetSuite Item Record. This field must contains the descriptive URL i.e. A URL that describe about the product.
It helps the search engines in the search results. It is recommended that the URL must be in small letters and words are separated by dashes “-“. For Example: round-wooden-ice-cream-stick-wood. The Meta tags for the product detail page can be added to the Meta Tag Html field in the NetSuite Item Record.
4. Generating Sitemap For Your SCA Website
Sitemaps are used to index your website to the search engines to start crawling the URLs of your website. Sitemaps contains almost all the URLs of your website. In SCA you can generate the Sitemap for your website and submit it to the Search Engine for indexing. In NetSuite, under SuiteCommerce Advanced option you can find the option for “SiteMap Generator”. By clicking on the option it opens up a screen where user can select different options like Frequency of Change, Forma (XML or HTML) and many more.
Once you select all the options and done entered with your email address you can click on submit. Once the Sitemap gets generated successfully you will receive an email on the entered email address. The email contains the link to your generated site map and also has the links to notify the Search Engines about your Sitemap. The Sitemap can then be submitted in Google Webmaster Search Console for crawling of pages.
5. Robots.txt
The robots.txt file is important for SEO because it tells the search engines bots about the different folders and pages it must not index. Pages that have privacy policy, terms and conditions and terms of use of a site are usually added in robots.txt file to prevent crawling by search engine bots.
Also, in SCA we have faceted navigation and all the pages have almost same content so it is important to tell search engines to ignore these URLs because duplicate content create negative impact on the search engine ranking. Learn more about robots.txt in the link mentioned (http://www.robotstxt.org/)
Conclusion
In this article we have learned the importance of SEO for NetSuite SuiteCommerce WebStore optimization. We have learned some techniques for Onsite SEO and how we can implement it in NetSuite SCA. In the next article we will learn about “How to setup the Google Webmaster tools” and some other techniques related to Offsite SEO.
