SEO presettings of your shop software

Search engine optimised URLs

To ensure a good search engine ranking, keywords should appear in the URL of a page.

Your shop has a modern URL structure that is optimised for search engines. It automatically generates a URL from information such as page, category or product names. The URL therefore automatically contains relevant keywords. If, for example, you're selling wine in your shop, there could be a category called "Wine", a subcategory "Red wine" and another subcategory of red wines called "French wines". Your shop system automatically creates the following URL: www.yourshop.com/c/wine/redwine/french-wines

Your shop URLs are structured like this:

Page type	Structure of the URL
Home	www.yourshop.com
Content page	www.yourshop.com/i/name-of-the-page
Category page	www.yourshop.com/c/name-of-the-category If there are two subcategories: www.yourshop.com/c/name-of-the-category/name-of-the-first-subcategory/name-of-the-second-subcategory
Product page	www.yourshop.com/p/name-of-the-product
Legal pages	www.yourshop.com/name-of-the-page
Basket	www.yourshop.com/basket

Page titles

Each page of your shop has a page title, also known as a title tag. This is displayed in the browser tab, for example. On search engines' result pages, the page title is usually displayed as a link to the website. It not only influences the search engine optimisation of your shop, but also plays a major role in whether search engine users select the link to your shop. If the page title does not appeal to the customer, it reduces the likelihood that they will visit your shop. The page title should contain the most important keywords for the respective page.

Page titles are automatically created by your shop system. However, you can change it for each page (except the legal pages).

The automatically created page titles are structured like this:

Page type	Structure of the page title	Example
Home	Shop name	Your Shop
Category page	Category name – Shop name	Wine – Your Shop
Product page	Product name – Shop name	Château Mouton Rothschild – Your Shop
Legal page	Page name – Shop name	Legal notice – Your Shop
Content page	Page name – Shop name	About us – Your Shop
All other pages	Page name – Shop name	Your basket – Your Shop

Alt tags

Search engines use alt tags of pictures to gain information about the pictures' content. This may be relevant for your shop's ranking.

For product images, the product name is automatically set as the alt tag. For pictures that you have added in the Editor, you can specify the alt tags yourself. For further information, refer to Alternative texts for images.

XML sitemap

An XML sitemap is a list of URLs that provide information about the subpages of a website. Submitting a site's sitemap to search engines like Google makes it easier for search engines to index the site.

Your shop automatically generates a sitemap in XML format. It can always be found at this address: https://www.yourshop.com/sitemap.xml

Replace "www.yourshop.com" with the domain of your shop.

As a merchant, you can submit the sitemap to Google in the Google Search Console. After a while, the sitemap will also be found by Google automatically, because it is noted in the file robots.txt (see next paragraph).

robots.txt

The robots.txt file is a text file that controls the behaviour of search engine crawlers.

Your shop's robots.txt file is set up so that all relevant subpages of your shop are tracked by Google and other search engines.

noindex

Some subpages of your shop should not be indexed by search engines. This includes your legal pages such as the legal notice and the checkout.

Due to the noindex tag in the meta tags of these pages, Google will not crawl those pages from your shop.

Duplicate content for products with variations

Search engines track if the same content exists on multiple websites. Generally you should avoid this in your shop.

If you offer products with variations in your shop, only the main product will be indexed by search engines. The individual variations are not indexed to avoid duplicate content.

Multiple languages in a shop

Your shop languages are defined in the source code of your shop. That allows search engines to know right away in which language a page is offered. This is especially helpful when a site is offered in various languages. For further information, refer to Add languages to your shop.