SEO Features
SEO has been designed into the product from the ground up, and Shop Banana includes everything required to implement effective SEO in your website:
- Dynamic customisable meta data
Data is provided to search engines via meta-data in the header section of your pages.
This data includes the page keywords, description and title plus other items that instruct the search engines how to search your site. Meta-data can be customised for every page on your websites and for every category and product.
- Automating meta-data
Meta-data can be set at a global site level, page level, category level and product level
For a full search engine optimisation of a website, this meta-data will be researched and configured at every level.
However, Shop Banana automatically defaults meta-data that isn’t set as follows:
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Title:
Defaults to the globally set website title for pages that don’t explicitly set it.
For category and product pages, if not explicitly set, defaults to the first 100 characters of the category or product description.
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Description:
Defaults to the globally set website description for pages that don’t explicitly set it.
For category and product pages, if not explicitly set, defaults to the first 250 characters of the category or product description.
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Keywords:
Defaults to the globally set website keywords for pages that don’t explicitly set it.
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For categories:
If not explicitly set, defaults to the page keywords.
If the page keywords are not set, defaults to the global keywords.
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For products:
If not explicitly set, defaults to the category keywords.
If the category keywords are not set, defaults to the page keywords.
If the page keywords are not set, defaults to the global keywords.
- URL rewriting
Every product and category in the website can have its own URL. This is very important to obtain a good search engine ranking. For example if you are selling a red toy train and the URL that displays this item is www.mywebsite.com/products.html there is no match between the URL and the product. If, however, the URL is www.mywebsite.com/red-toy-train.html there is a match, and this will improve your search engine ranking.
- Image alternate text and URLs
Every image on the website can have its title, alt-text and URL set independently. This is another important factor in search engine ranking - for example, an image of a red toy train that you are selling should have a URL something like www.mywebsite.com/images/red-toy-train.jpg, and alternate-text of Red toy train
- Search engine friendly links
When a search engine indexes your site, it should be able to find every page in your website. This is only possible if links are 'real' links to other pages in your site (as opposed to links that use a postback mechanism or use javascript to process requests). Shop Banana pages render all links using real links to get maximum index coverage.
- Link and traffic building features
Shop Banana has built in discussion forum and blogging capabilities - these can be used to promote your website and build traffic and links.
Website content (products, promotions, vouchers, blogs, forums, news, projects, classified ads) can by syndicated to other websites. Support for RSS/ATOM formats is built in, and the template based approach to syndication means any other format can be supported with ease.
- 301 Redirect
Shop Banana automatically handles '301 redirects'. This avoids two or more website urls that point to the same page sharing the SEO score and moving the page down the search engine rankings. For example, http://your-website.com and http://www.yourwebsite.com will both go to the home page of your website, but to the search engines these are separate addresses and the SEO score will be split between the two. The search engine then has two entries for the same page, but with half the score for each, so neither will rank as well as a single entry with the whole score.
Shop Banana automatically detects these duplicates and makes the addresses the same so there is no splitting of the SEO score.
- Special SEO area
The Shop Banana administration tool contains a special SEO section that takes you step-by-step through the SEO process and contains tips and advice on how to get the best search engine ranking possible.