SEO (or Search engine optimization) is the process of improving your site's ranking in search results in engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo to generate free traffic to your website. While some things can be manual, we have the technical side covered for you — all websites built with Squarely are optimized for search engines by default. See a detailed description of what we do to make SEO a priority.
First things first, your customer’s private data (their name, email, credit card details, etc.) has to be secured from hackers, scammers, and data thieves with HTTPS protocol and an SSL certificate. Not only can those tools improve security and increase your trustworthiness, but they can also help your website rank better in search engines. We provide an SSL certificate and HTTPS protocol for every account for free. Websites that aren't SSL-secured may be penalized in search engine rankings.
We automatically generate a sitemap.xml file that contains a list of the site pages. This file is used by search engines like Google to crawl and index your products so that your website's pages appear in search results. New pages and new products or services are indexed faster with sitemaps since search engines check sitemaps every day.
Structured data is a set of special tags on the website code that help search engines to see what information on the site is more important. This helps index the products, services and categories better. Squarely uses micro-data by Schema.org to annotate information and adds it to all website pages automatically. This product information appears in search results.
By default, Squarely generates product and service metadata (page title and meta description) automatically, based on the product or service names and descriptions. You can control how exactly Google displays your product pages in the search snippets with custom meta titles and descriptions so they are sweet and short for Google users.
Simple, descriptive, and clean URLs are a basic SEO technique. Squarely automatically generates SEO-friendly URLs for products and categories (from their titles) as well as cart and checkout pages. They are easily indexed and read by search engines. Here is an example of a product page with a clean URL: https://example.business.shop/Blue-Flannel-p699812.... Such URLs are short, meaningful and clean from hashes (“#”) and other parameters like “?”, “&” and “=”, so people and algorithms can easily read them.
“ALT” is a tag used to explain images to search engine robots. Your store creates ALT-tags for images automatically with the same text as the product or service title.
All website built with Squarely have a mobile-optimized layout that automatically adapts to the size of a visitor’s screen. It is important: not only it makes your website appear more aesthetically pleasing from all screens but has a higher priority in Google search results.
Search engines do not always index dynamic websites well. To ensure they index the stores, we use special technology. Squarely creates a static HTML copy for every product and category page in your store, then gives this copy to a search engine. This helps Google and other search engines index your website as if it were a static HTML site.
Robots.txt is a text file that shows search engines what pages can be indexed. Search engines can index all the product, service and category pages on Squarely websites, but they will not see the cart page or search results. These pages should not be indexed as their content is different for every visitor.
This one doesn’t impact SEO directly, but it makes links shared on social media and messengers more compelling to your potential customers. Your website generates open graph meta tags for social media sites, so when you share links on Google, Facebook, Twitter (and more) you get a beautiful preview with a title, image, and description for your site.
For Squarely users: you can customize the image that is displayed as a preview when someone shares a link to your site on social media. From your admin panel, go to Website → Edit Site. In the editor on the left bottom click Settings → SEO → Site image, then add your custom image.
There are 189 million active websites on the internet, so yours won’t get to the top of Google naturally. You have to enter the race for the sweet spot by working on your website SEO: collect keywords that customers use to find your products or services, include them in your product titles and descriptions, use only original and unique website content, advertise it, and make others want to link to it on their resources. That’s quite a bunch of work, so we prepared a detailed SEO checklist for you to follow: How to improve your website SEO?
