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Published on 19/06/2015 1:33 PM by John debrincat

Website SEO You Can Control Yourself with ePages

Make Your Website Content Structured To Improve SEO

So what do we mean by structured content and how does it improve how your website or online store appear in search engines?

Search engines like Google look for clues in your content to the meaning of the page and the importance of content in the page. These can often be referred to as "snippets" and Google provide great advice on best practice.

The first element that is often used is the Title tag which appears in the HTML head area as <title>...content here....</title> this is one of the main clues that search engines use. The Title should be generally around 65 characters long and contain a good description of the main content. It will appear in search results and when you mouse over the tab in your browser.

There are other snippets like the Meta Content Description that is used in the search displayed results.

All these snippets help with your search engine results by either improving search engine optimisation or by helping the search engine to show more meaningful information about your page to the person searching.

google_result

There are other tags like the Image alt tag that help search engines understand the content that cannot be read in this case images. The "alt" tag appears in the HTML and should contain meaningful information about the image that it is associated to.

All these help improve search results.

Structured Content

Website webmasters, content managers and owners need to help search engines understand what the content on a page is all about. In this case we are talking about the content that appears between the <body> </body> tags.

In HTML there is a concept called <H> tags these are structured from H1 to H6 and are used to structure content. There should only be one H1 tag on a webpage, or at least carefully used.

Structured H1 through H6

On the webpage the main title of the page should be the H1 following that the content is broken into sections so that the H1 section can contain many H2 tags. H2 sections can contain many H3 tags and so on.

With most good Content Management (CMS) or eCommerce Solutions editors the system will help you setup default formats for H1 through H6 tags so that you have consistency of font, font size and font colour.

Then when creating content is is very easy to format that content with the correct H tag.

So you can see from this example using ePages that I can select the content I want to format and then select the H tag that I want applied and it’s done.

heading_tags

Use Styling to emphasise the structure

By styling the H1, H2, H3 etc tags differently you can give a visual indication of the structure. The H1 might be larger font (or different) than the H2 which might be larger than the H3. Always make the font and font size of the content consistent so as to help make the webpage visually appealing. You can also use other HTML markup tags to emphasise the content for example by using the <strong> (important text) </strong> tags. Again these different tags should be available in your CMS or eCommerce Solution editor.

In summary you need to help search engines understand that content is important on your webpage by correctly structuring the content. If you over use some tags like the H1 tag it may result a reduced ranking by search engines. So try to follow the guideline and help make your website content more search engine friendly.

ePages Search Engine Optimisation Cockpit

ePages now provides a center for search engine optimisation advice right in the administation control panel of your online store. This helps you to obtain the best possible results without wasting a lot of hard earned money.

ePages Builtin SEO Cockpit

XML and HTML Sitemaps

ePages allows you to create and maintain automatically XML and HTML sitemaps. The XML sitemaps can be sumbitted to Google and Bing from the SEO Cockpit that is found in the Marketing Menu in your Administration Control Panel of the online store.

Once created ePages will automatically update the sitemap content as the online store content is changed.

Short URLs

Every ePages 6 Cloud based online store comes with an ability to define short, keyword based, URLs to replace the data base genreated URLs. Short URLs can be used to help your visitors more easily remember your shop pages access.

By creating the Short URLs using your product and business keywords you can also help improve your search engine optimisation.

Keywords and Tags

HTML provides for sections (tags) in a Web page which are not displayed in a browser but can be evaluated by a search engine. Search engines ignore some of these because they were often misused in the past. In general, keywords should be distributed uniformly over the whole page.

Title-Tag

The TITLE tag is the most important element for SEO. It is of course used in ePages 6. It is automatically filled with the product name followed by the shop name.

The Title should always start with the probable search term. The company name comes next. This also fulfils the requirement that every subpage has a unique TITLE tag so that the shop can be found using many different search terms.

Every Page and Product has an SEO Score and Advisor

product

Every category, content, product, blog and Forum page has an SEO Score and advice on how to improve the SEO on the individual page. Once you have created a new page or product then check the SEO advice for the page and begin to improve the score and therefore the potential search engine ranking. Small changes can very often make a big difference.

Search Engine Optimisation is not a set once and forget process but is an ongoing task that you should allocate some time to every day. Once you start to improve the SEO score on a page you will begin to see the improvements in search results. It is not instantaneous but if you track the changes that you make you will see your results higher on you main keyword searches.

Google Mobile Friendly Sites

mobile

Google has now started to check your website to see if it is mobile friendly meaning can it be used easily on a mobile phone or small tablet. Google checks if the site is touch friendly and if the text is readable with enough spacing between images and touch items among other things. You can check if a web page is mobile friendly at the Google Mobile Friendly checking tool.

ePages aautomatically allows your online store website to be mobile friendly by using a separate view for mobiles that is responsive (meaning resizes depending on device screen size).

You can enable it at Setting menu >> General settings >> Presentation.

Use The SEO Dashboard Widget to Track SEO

seo_check_widget

ePages provide a handy SEO widget that you can install on the administration dashboard to help you keep track of unchecked pages and products. The widget provides a hot link that will take you directly to the page that needs to be checked. It also provides an overview of the website average SEO score.

SEO is based on each language that you have on your website

If you run an online store with mumtiple languages then remember to check the SEO score for the content in each language so that you get the best search results for customers searching in their own languages and from their own countries. ePages helps by scoring every language for you.

seo international