Introduction

Are you worried if your store has the correct configuration for the search engine and where should you start your store optimization for the search engine, if yes, then you should go through the below checklist:

In this article, we will be covering three major steps that will assist you in optimizing your store for search engines:

1- System Configurations:

• Auto Redirect Base-URL using 301 Redirects

1. Go to your admin panel > Advanced> Settings
2. Click on Web under General section
3. Click on URL Options tab and change Auto-redirect to Base URL to Yes (301 Moved Permanently)
4. Click on Save Config

• Web Server Rewrites:

In order to avoid using index.php string in your store URL, follow the below steps:

1. Go to your admin panel> Advanced > Settings
2. Click on Web under General section
3. Click on Search Engine Optimization tab and change Use Web Server Rewrites to Yes
4. Click on Save Config

• Catalog Search Engine Optimization Configurations:

To avoid duplicate content in the catalog URLs and to optimize your catalog for search engines, follow the below steps:

1. Go to your admin panel> Advanced > Settings
2. Under Catalog section, Click on Catalog and open Search Engine Optimization tab
3. Set Product URL Suffix and Category URL Suffix to .html.
4. Set Use Categories Path for Product URLs to No.
5. Set Create Permanent Redirect for URLs if URL Key Changed to Yes.
6. Set Page Title Separator to a hyphen.
7. Set Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Categories and Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Products to Yes
8. Click on Save Config

2- Google Sitemap:

Earlier in Welcome to Growth stage, we have covered the steps of generating a Google Sitemap in your store’s configurations and submitting it in your Google Webmaster Tools, as Google Sitemap is an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. Follow this Article to read more about Google Sitemap

3- Meta Data:

Meta Description tag in HTML is a 160-320 character snippet used in search engines to summarize the webpage’s content and to let searchers know what the page is about. In this stage of the Growth Program, we will be covering Meta Data in more details, follow this Article for more information.

Outcome

By the end of this article, you should set the right configuration for search engine optimization.

The impact of these changes may not be enough to be visible on organic search results. Your store growth specialist will give you more recommendations to get better results.