ShopFactory SEO – search engine optimization

ShopFactory is already search engine friendly — meaning it builds pages that search engines can read. All you have to do is add your text content as you build each page. The page SEO tools are right in the editor and chances are you have probably already used them — but may not have known why those features are actually there in the editor. We will explain this shortly...

While you can optimize your pages, did you know that in ShopFactory 8 you can now optimize your products as well? This topic on product SEO will be covered in our next newsletter.

With these points in mind, the key factor in getting high rankings on search engines is in how you add your text and keep it "keyword rich" using the tools included in ShopFactory. Always remember — Search Engines read text so that is what you must focus on.

Page Content — Keyword Rich

When you open ShopFactory double click on any page under index 2 and you will open up the "Page Properties Wizard". You will see a window like the image below (this part of the editor is different from the Meta-Tags wizard in the editor — covered in our next newsletter).

You will first notice there are four sections: Title, Introduction, Description and Image. Not only are these the sections for your page content set-up, they are an important part of your SEO tool kit in ShopFactory.

For example, say we want to optimize our page for the keywords: Compact Digital Cameras. In our Title we would use these keywords by themselves to give them weight as a specific keyword phrase. Do not confuse this "Content Title" with your Meta-Tags Page Title, which we will cover in the next newsletter.

We would then repeat the keyword phrase in the short Introduction of the page set-up wizard. Under the Description you would then repeat and break up the keywords throughout the description paragraph as shown in the example. You will notice all three keywords are used in each section of the page properties wizard.

What you do not see in this screen shot is the Image SEO content. For the image I used the actual file name called: compact-digital-cameras.jpg. It is important to name (or rename) all your image file names correctly as that image file name text adds hidden weight to your page SEO. Using a dash- or an _underscore to provide the keyword breakup on your file name helps tell the search engine what the image is actually about.

Also hidden is the Caption (as highlighted on the above image icon). The caption is the Alt. Tag pop-up text you see when you mouse over an image in a browser. It is very important to add the Alt. Tag Caption to all your images. In this example the camera image Alt. Tag is: Compact Digital Cameras — this also tells the search engines what the image actually is about since search engines cannot actually read images.

The above is just a basic SEO example. As you get more into page layouts using tables and additional images, you can fine tune your search engine optimization techniques for specific pages, content and keywords.

In our next two sets of newsletters we will touch on SEO topics like Meta-Tags, linking and additional key wording content through your entire ShopFactory website.