Search engine optimization (SEO)

What is search engine optimization?

The process of improving the visibility and ranking of a website on search engines is called Search engine optimization (SEO).

This is an on-going process of gradual improvement by using various optimization techniques and practices, including keyword research, content creation, link building, and technical website optimization. SEO aims to boost organic traffic to a website from search engines like Google.

While optimizing a website for search engines, there are no set guidelines to follow. The following advice serves as a general guide, but if you require more comprehensive help with your website's SEO, it may be wise to consider working with a professional.

For expert assistance with Shopify store services, we highly recommend our preferred customization service providers.

Speed

Site speed is a large ranking factor in SEO. Read the Performance guide for more.

Headings (H1s)

The proper use of heading tags helps search engines to understand the content on your page. The first heading on the page should be the H1 tag, and should accurately reflect the main topic or theme of the page. Within Enterprise, there should be one H1 tag per page and having multiple H1 tags per page is discouraged.

Several of Enterprise's sections have a Set as page heading (uses h1 tag) setting, which allows you to manually set the H1 tag on the page. This setting exists on the following sections:

• Rich Text
• Background video
• Media with text
• Image banner
• Slideshow
• Video

Collection page descriptions

To enhance both user experience and SEO on your Shopify store, it's important to effectively utilize the description for your collection pages. The description provides an opportunity to incorporate relevant keywords, improving the page's visibility in search results. However, it's important to ensure a balance between incorporating keywords and offering valuable information to users.

Keywords should be integrated naturally into the description, avoiding the use of excessive or stuffed keywords, as this can negatively impact SEO by appearing spammy to search engines.

If a collection description contains useful ranking information but is not necessarily important for users to read, a Rich text section could be used to contain the collection description (using metafields), and the section can be placed at the bottom of the collection page.This way, the description will be crawled by search engines, and is less likely to be read by customers.

Page titles

The theme appends the store name to the page title (SEO title), if it does not already exist in the title. 

If the home page title is “Store Name - We sell great things” the theme won’t add the store name again. But on a product page, the store name would be added to the page title, “Product X - Store Name”, as the product title does not already contain the store name.

This feature can prove beneficial:

• When someone shares a link to a product or collection on social media or platforms like WhatsApp, the store name will appear in the title of that link.
• Customers with multiple tabs open in their browser can easily identify and return to the store by previewing tabs with the store name.
• If a page is bookmarked, having the store name in the page title provides clarity and ease of reference.
• The entire page title is indexed by search engines. So it may improve results for searches including the store name.

Given its widespread adoption and the technical implications of altering theme code, we generally advise against modifying this feature without a compelling reason, however, the code for this, if needed, can be found in Snippets/doc-head-core.liquid. Implementation of code alterations falls outside the scope of our theme support (provided for free).