SEO Best Practices in SuiteCommerce Advanced – PART 1
Hi guys,
In this post I’ll show you how to do search engine optimization (SEO) for your SuiteCommerce Advanced web store(s). Search engine optimization is absolutely vital if you want your SuiteCommerce Advanced web store to be visible in Google search results to visitors searching for items relevant to your products or services. Proper SEO can not only bring traffic to your web store, it can also generate direct sales by connecting potential customers with your store and products.
There are generally two types of SEO activities that need to be performed in order to ensure that your web store shows up in the top results for relevant searches.
On-site SEO – which ensures that search engines crawl all keywords, meta tags, titles, content etc. on each web page of your web store AND
Offsite SEO – which helps search engines find information on your web pages from hyperlinks mentioned on other websites
SEO in NetSuite SuiteCommerce Advanced
There are many SEO techniques you can use to ensure that the pages of your web store are optimized for search engines. The following SEO techniques though are the effective if you want your SuiteCommerce Advanced web store to rank quickly in Google search rankings.
1. Image Optimization
The first thing you need optimize on your SuiteCommerce Advanced web store is the images you have used and the way to do that is by optimizing the alternate text on all images as well as the image file names. These are described in more detail below.
Image Alternate Text – the alternate text on images helps search engines associate that image with the keyword being searched for. By providing an alternate text for your image which contains the keyword being searched, you basically tell the search engine that the site hosting this image is related to the keyword being searched for. So along with relevant content on that page or pages, if the search engine finds that images on your web store also have text which contains the keyword being searched for, it will know that your web store is relevant to the search term being queried and will therefore rank your SuiteCommerce Advanced web store higher for that search query. You can edit the the Image file in Netsuite to add Alt Text to it.
Image File Names – it also helps to use descriptive names for image files on your SuiteCommerce Advanced webstore. This practice helps search engines look up and index your web store images much more quickly. In SuiteCommerce Advanced you can your match your image filenames with your item identifier to make them more relevant in search results. This item identifier can be any one of the following:
- Display Name/Code
- UPC Code
- URL Component
2. Content Delivery & Static Pages
In SuiteCommerce Advanced you can also create static pages either by using its CMS (Contact Management System) features or by using its Content Delivery features. If you use the CMS approach, then you can just edit any page using the CMS feature and add the meta-tag information for that page. You should also add the following tags & keywords on your Home and Item Category pages as well, as search engines uses these keywords and meta-tags to determine whether the content on your SuiteCommerce Advanced webstore’s pages is relevant to the search term in question. It is therefore a best practice to have the following meta data on every page of your web store.
- Page Title: this is the title appears in the browse’s title bar.
- Meta Keywords and Meta Description: search engines uses these to find your page.
- Page Header: This content replaces the existing header for the page.
- Addition to <head> field: here you can enter any information you want to add to the <head> HTML element for that page.
3. Adding Descriptive URLs and Meta Tags to Item Detail Pages
You should also add the Product Details pages’ URLs to the URL Component fields in your NetSuite item records. These field should contain descriptive URLs i.e. URLs that describe your product for e.g. LA-Lakers-Team-Shirt-Small. This will help your item pages rank higher in related search results. It is recommended that you name your URL using small letters and words and separate those with dashes “-“. For e.g. round-wooden-ice-cream-stick-wood. You should also add the meta-tags of your product detail page to the Meta Tag Html field in your NetSuite item record.
4. Generating a Sitemap For Your SuiteCommerce Advanced web store
Search engines use sitemaps to index your website and crawl all of its URLs as sitemaps contain almost all of the URLs present on your site. You can generate the sitemap for your SuiteCommerce Advanced web store and submit it to the search engine for indexing by navigating to the ‘SuiteCommerce Advanced’ option in NetSuite, and selecting the “SiteMap Generator” option. When you click on this option it will open up a screen where you can select different options related to your SuiteCommerce Advanced web store’s sitemap like its Frequency of Change, its Format (XML or HTML) and many others. Once you’ve selected all the options and have entered your email address, just hit the ‘Submit’ button. Once the sitemap’s been generated successfully, you will receive an email confirming the same on the email address you provided. This email contains the link to your generated site map and also has the links you can use to notify search engines about your sitemap.
5. Robots.txt
The last technique you can use is your web store’s robots.txt file. The robots.txt file is important for SEO because it tells search engines which pages to index. By using this file you can tell the search engine to ignore the pages on your SuiteCommerce Advanced web store that have repetitive content. You can also set specific rules in your robots.txt file telling the search engine to ignore certain URLs that have specific keywords. To learn more about the important of the robotx.txt file, head over to following link – http://www.robotstxt.org/
Wrap Up
In this post I showed you some the top techniques you can use for on-site SEO of your SuiteCommerce Advanced web store and how to implement them. In my next post I’ll show you how to use the Google Webmaster tools and some other techniques for off-site SEO of your SuiteCommerce Advanced web store(s).