So many people do not understand search engine optimization. They think it is some form of art or magic or something. No, it’s not magic. It is arranging data and information in a way that makes sense. Well, it is arranging data in a way that makes sense to a robot. A robot? What do you mean SEO is about arranging data for a robot? Well, unlike actual human people, Google is a machine, it can not look at something and make sense of it. For example, Google can not look at a web page and understand it or form an opinion about it. Only humans can form opinions. Google is a machine. Google is a bot.
Googlebot Needs to Understand Your Website
A bot is a program that comes to your website and “crawls” the website to understand what the website is about. The bot is specifically going to areas on the website that it looks for data. The bot is looking for that data, and if it finds that data, it uses it to determine what the content of the website is about. So, if you know that a bot is coming to visit your website, what can you do? You can go to all the places on your website, and there are many, that a bot goes to, to look for information and add data to these places. Specifically you can “optimize” the data to help the search bot understand. And that is search engine optimization in a very brief explanation. It is really not more complicated than that. The thing that is important to remember is that this is how the internet is built. This is how information is passed along on the internet, which is in language that a bot can understand, which is HTML or hypertext markup language. A good Durham SEO company works with all web pages the same way because they are all built on the backbone of HTML. Now, there are some subtle differences depending on the type of site you are working on.
Shopify SEO For Ecommerce
A subtle difference to your approach to optimization would be if you are working on an e-comm site. Ecommerce is different because of all the different categories and product pages. And Ecomm sites almost always have issues with duplicate content. The duplicate content is such that an actual buyer on your website, a human, would even notice that there are duplicate pages, but a machine, a bot would notice the duplicate pages. The duplicate pages are not good because the duplicate content confuses a bot. The bot does not know which page is more important and therefore does not know which page to show in the search results. Of course this is a problem. So what do you do, to help the bot understand which page is the original content? You fix this issue by creating the correct canonical tags. What is a canonical tag? Good question, you can go read this excellent article by Ahrefs on the topic: https://ahrefs.com/blog/canonical-tags/. Basically a canonical tag is a piece of code you put on a webpage that says, “this is the original version of this webpage, and therefore this is the page that you should put in your Index and rank in the search results.” A bot will see this tag and understand which page is important and disregard the other pages that are duplicate or near-identical versions of the page. This is definitely a problem you have to fix in Shopify because this issue is designed into the Shopify platform. The issue is that every product has it’s product page like this mystore.com/product/tennis-shoe and then there are categories so every category is listed like mystore.com/category/athletic-footwear. If someone clicks on the Tennis Shoe from the category page, then end up on a duplicate page that is mystore.com/category/athletic-footwear/product/tennis-shoe, even though it is the exact same page as the mystore.com/product/tennis-shoe page. Do you see how this is a duplicate and this is also confusing? Well, this is also confusing to a bot. You have to go into the Shopify theme’s code to fix here. Here is a good Question and Answer from the Shopify Help Desk that will help you understand: https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-Discussion/Duplicate-Content-Same-Page-with-different-url/td-p/392224 This stuff gets a bit technical because you have to go in and edit the code. You don’t want to make a mistake here, so if you do not feel comfortable editing your website’s code, you’ll want to hire someone to do it for you. It’s not too complicated though. You want to look for the products.liquid.file. It’s kinda buried so don’t be surprised if you have to look for a while. Once you find the products.liquide.file you are going to find something that looks like these three examples: <a href=”{{ product.url | within: current_collection }}” class=”product-grid-item”> You want to edit it to look like this: <a href=”{{ product.url }}” class=”product-grid-item”> <a class=”grid-view-item__link grid-view-item__image-container full-width-link” href=”{{ product.url | within: current_collection }}”> You want to edit it to look like this: <a class=”grid-view-item__link grid-view-item__image-container full-width-link” href=”{{ product.url }}”> <a href=”{{ product.url | within: collection }}”> You want to edit it to look like this: <a href=”{{ product.url }}”> Do you see what we are doing? We are basically just taking out the |within: collection, and that fixes out the duplicate content issues. This will help a machine to better understand the information on your website and it also gets rid of a bunch of low-value duplicate pages. Now, this definitely helps your site, but it’s not the biggest thing in the world. The reason is that this just fixes your Product pages, which is good. The problem is, what usually ranks in Google is your Collection pages, and this fix doesn’t necessarily help those pages. And this is how you get the attention of search engines. You go through the places that a bot goes to look for information and you see if the information is there and if it makes sense. Sometimes you notice the information is missing and needs to be added, and sometimes you see the information is broken and needs to be fixed. And now you know SEO.
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