Let Your ecommerce Platform Automate Some of the Most Important Functions For Online Presence When it comes to SEO, not all platforms are created equal. If you're a business owner or marketer, you probably already know how important it is to create and maintain a strong online presence. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is among the best ways to achieve that goal, but there's no reason to limit it to your main site. If you're selling online too, the right ecommerce platform can significantly bolster your SEO efforts without requiring a lot of extra work from you. Before selecting an ecommerce platform, then, familiarize yourself with the most effective SEO-friendly features to ensure you get the most bang for your buck. Page Titles Some ecommerce platforms are so bare-bones in design that they give you little or no control over the title tags for individual pages. From the standpoint of SEO, this is a major drawback. Page titles can be loaded with relevant keywords, and they're crawled by search engine spiders to help inform results pages. Having the ability to assign unique title tags to each page is a major advantage in general, but it's especially beneficial on an ecommerce site, where main pages split off into category pages that are further divided into subcategories and individual product pages. By creating unique page titles, you'll have more opportunities for your products to be indexed by the major search engines, and those efforts will enhance your SEO efforts in a big way. Keyword-Rich URLs As with page title tags, the URLs for individual pages on your site can double as locations for relevant keywords that drive SEO. Unfortunately, some ecommerce platforms automatically assign generic, meaningless URLs to individual pages. Skip past those and pot for one that automatically generates static URLs based on the page title tags and other information. While you're at it, make sure you will have direct control over the URLs so you can edit them as needed. Canonicalization As nonsensical as the word may seem, canonicalization plays an important part in any effective SEO strategy. It refers to prioritizing URLs to ensure that Google knows how to properly index a website. Oftentimes, a single page will have several URLs pointing to it. They are usually made up of the primary URL plus a string of irrelevant data at the end. That irrelevant data can throw Google for a loop and might even cause your site to be flagged for duplicate content. Therefore, select an ecommerce platform that allows you to add the canonical tag to your website's code. This tag will point Google to the primary URL and instruct it to ignore the others, and this will enhance the overall power of your links. Auto-Created XML Sitemaps While new pages are infrequently added to regular websites, they're fairly common on ecommerce sites, where new products and product categories are created all the time. As an ecommerce site owner, you're going to want the world to know about those new products and product categories as quickly as possible, which means you'll want Google to index them promptly. The best way to make that happen is by regularly updating your site's XML sitemap. That can be a major chore, but top-quality ecommerce platforms can do the heavy lifting for you. They also help search engine spiders navigate and categorize your site more quickly and efficiently, which helps to enhance SEO in a major way. Noindex Meta Tags All sites contain pages that are best left out of the search engine results, and ecommerce sites are no different. Typically, these pages consist of things like form submission confirmation information and the like, and they can detract from the power of the more pertinent parts of your site. The noindex meta tag instructs Google to ignore such pages, and many ecommerce platforms allow you to denote such pages with a click of the mouse button. That's one less thing you'll have to worry about, so look for a platform that supports this feature. Site Structure Your ecommerce site shouldn't just be easy for humans to navigate; it should be easy for search engine bots to crawl too. Top-notch ecommerce platforms understand that and are designed to create logical navigational structures. This is a major plus for site owners who are unversed in the best navigational structures for ecommerce sites, so keep your eyes peeled for this feature as well. Clarity Can Help Even after being armed with this information, wading through the many ecommerce platforms that are out there is pretty overwhelming. Unlike most platforms, Clarity ecommerce is designed with SEO best practices in mind, so it's a reliable way to transform your ecommerce site into an SEO-enhancing workhorse. Find out what Clarity can do for you with our professional SEO services by contacting us for a free consultation and quote today.