SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – This word may sound scary to some webmasters who’ve had a bad experience with it.
But eventually, if you want more traffic and sales from your eCommerce website organically, SEO is the #1 source.
Fortunately, if you have been using WordPress for your eCommerce store, SEO becomes even easier for you.
How?
In this blog post, I will be sharing 7 tweaks that you can make on your WordPress eCommerce website and increase the probability of reaching top positions of search engines.
Let’s begin.
#1 Changing Permalink Structure
Setting the permalink structure correctly can help your eCommerce website to generate SEO-friendly URLs for your products and other pages.
How to do this?
Just go to Settings and click “Permalinks”.
Here you will see various options for you to choose from and decide how your webpage URLs will look for both users and search engines.
Most of these options look incredibly ugly and they tend to hurt your SEO score because they’re neither user-friendly nor SEO-friendly.
Ideally, you must choose the Post Name option to make your links look clean and readable.
#2 Work Out Harder On Titles & Description
Meta title and description of a page are what appears on search engine results page when you look out for any information on search engines.
Therefore, as a rule of thumb, you must ensure that:
a. Your meta titles and descriptions have appropriate keywords in them.
b. Each page of your eCommerce has a unique title and description.
c. You do not leave the meta title and description of any page empty.
#3 Caching & Speed Optimization
One of the important factors of your eCommerce website’s SEO is its loading speed.
If your WordPress eCommerce website takes forever to load, you must take this matter seriously and take immediate action to improve the loading speed.
There are several caching plugins available for WordPress websites that you can install & activate on your eCommerce store and improve its loading speed. One of these great plugins is W3 Total Cache.
I have personally used this plugin for several WordPress websites and have got astonishing results.
You may also like to read my other blog post in which I shared “7 actions to improve the loading speed of a WordPress eCommerce website“.
#4 Automate Product Page Titles
If you have an eCommerce website with thousands of products, it may be difficult for you to write a title for each page manually. Here comes the option of automated product page titles for your rescue.
To automate the titles, you can simply install & activate the “SEO by Yoast” plugin on your WordPress eCommerce website and set the option of automated titles so that each web page’s SEO title will be pulled automatically from its respective product title.
Using the plugin, go to SEO > Titles and Metas so you can customize what automatic text will pull for your SEO titles.
#5 Optimize Product Images
Another great way to boost the SEO of your eCommerce website is to optimize your product images.
Here are a few quick tips to optimize your product images:
- Name each file with an appropriate keyword.
- Make sure to use alt tags for each product image that includes keywords and tell the user what the image actually is.
- Optimizing the size of your images for your eCommerce website so that they don’t slow down your site.
- Keep your thumbnail image file sizes small because these things drain your site speed.
#6 XML Sitemap
XML Sitemaps help search engine spiders to discover and index the pages of your eCommerce website which further increases the chances of getting your website ranked in higher positions in search engines.
Again, there are many plugins like “Google XML Sitemaps” available for WordPress websites that you use can use to create and submit Sitemaps with major search engines like Google.
#7 Use Breadcrumbs
What are breadcrumbs?
Breadcrumbs are those little tabs on the top of your web pages that show the structure/hierarchy of your current page. For eg. Home > Shop > For Men > Watches > Watch Name.
In the above example, the breadcrumb shows that you are on a specific watch page that comes under the men’s category of eCommerce shop.
How do these breadcrumbs help with SEO?
These breadcrumbs help search engine crawlers to understand the hierarchy of your eCommerce store and thereby visit each of these links and index them in their database.