Search Engine Optimisation

Introduction

Ensuring your website is search engine friendly is critical to making the web an effective part of your business. There are all sorts of reasons why a website is not search engine friendly, the most common are websites that are built entirely in Flash, so avoid building such websites.

Optimising with our platform

Websites that use our platform are 100% search engine friendly. That means the major search engines are aware of all the content on your website. By content we mean your web pages, announcements, FAQs, literature such as your PDFs documents, shopping catalogues and more. Of course if you make any content secure then we automatically exclude it from the list that is available to the search engines.

On regular intervals the system will produce your website's sitemap in the format specified by Google and Yahoo.These search engines will then pick up your sitemap and add all the content on your website to their database.At anytime you can check and view the sitemap document that we produce located at the two URLs listed below.

The sitemap can be found at http://yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

These are only the first steps in fully optimising your site - you should research the topic further to get the best results.

Enabling sitemap.xml

You need to enable the optimisation first in order for the sitemap.xml to be created. You do this in Admin -> Google/Yahoo/Live Optimisation.

The system will take up to 24 hours to compile it.

NOTE: You should only do this after you have added your domain name through Admin: Manage Domain Names. This process can result in your staging domain receiving search preference if done beforehand

Once the system has compiled it you can go to http://YourDomain.com/sitemap.xml and you'll see all the links there. That's when you can go to Google's webmaster tools and submit the site.

Hiding Pages from Search Engines

Before or after you've enabled Google/Yahoo/Live Optimisation from the Admin menu of your Online Business, you can hide various pages from being indexed by search engines. When you are editing your page on your Online Business Administration area, click the "Add META data to this page" link. On the following dialogue, select the "robots" field to edit. Change the default value from "INDEX,FOLLOW" to "NOINDEX". Its advisable that if you are working on content that is not ready for indexing you adjust this META tag before you start the Optimisation service.

Using Catalogue Name in URLs (SEO Friendly)

All catalogues URLs in the system are in the format of:

http://www.yourdomain.com/CatalogueRetrieve.aspx?CatalogueID=XYZ. Although the URL for every catalogue is permanent and does not change, you can choose to use a different format for your catalogue URLs to ensure a higher level of SEO friendliness.

When creating links to your catalogues from any web page or your navigational menus you can use the following format:

http://www.yourdomain.com/_catalogue_catalogueID/CatalogueName

So if your catalogue is called Dishwashers then your URL would be:

http://www.yourdomain.com/_catalogue_catalogueID/DishWashers

Replace catalogueID with a number which is generated by the system.

Dynamic Menu's

Please note that the default dynamic menu type is designed for focus on easy design and use. To optimize your site for SEO purposes you will need to ensure that you use the CSS(HTML only) dynamic menu type.

Other SEO information

To ensure good SEO practices all redirects within the system are a 301 Permanent Redirect.

SEO - Search Engine Optimisation