[What is technical SEO? The basics of improving crawlability that newcomers to EC sites should know first]
Have you started operating an e-commerce site and are working hard to register products and write blog articles, but are you worried that your site is not showing up in search results? The reason for this may be the lack of "technical SEO" where search engines are not able to properly navigate the site, rather than the quality of the content. In this article, we will thoroughly explain the basics of improving search engine crawlability, which new e-commerce site managers should understand first.
Table of Contents (Click to Expand)
1. What is technical SEO? Importance of preparing infrastructure
Technical SEO refers to optimizing the technical foundation of a website so that search engine crawlers (traveling programs) can efficiently collect information on the site and correctly register (index) it in the database.
While content SEO focuses on the ``content'' of ``what to convey'', technical SEO is the work of creating a ``pathway to convey the message correctly.'' Especially on e-commerce sites with a large number of products, it is easy for crawlers to get lost, so this aisle design has a direct impact on search rankings.
2. Specific methods to improve crawlability
The first thing you need to do is submit your XML sitemap and utilize robots.txt.
- XMLSitemap: A file that lists all URL pages within the site、directly telling crawlers'please look at this page'をacting as a map to communicateをfulfills this role。
- Robots.txt: Reverse に'You don't need to look at this page'is a file that instructs。such as admin panels and duplicate content、crawling of low-value pagesをby limiting、crawl budget (巡回予算）をcan be focused on important pages。
3. Issues specific to EC sites and index optimization
On e-commerce sites, "duplicate content" tends to occur due to different colors and sizes. If you leave these things unchecked, your rankings from search engines will be dispersed.
Use canonical tags to clearly identify canonical URLs and organize your internal link structure into a pyramid to guide crawlers to prioritize the most important product categories.
4. Visualization of improvement effects and data analysis
After implementing technical SEO measures, check the indexing status using Google Search Console, etc. The graph below shows the change in the number of indexed pages after implementing crawlability improvement measures.
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References
- [1] Google Search Central: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide
- [2] W3C: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Searchability