SEO

The platform supports SEO-friendly design that helps the storefront website rank higher on search engine results pages. It’s easy to use, fully optimized, and provides excellent SEO performance.

Setup

The platform automatically generates the following following files to enable website crawling for search engine:

• XML sitemap - to help Google index your store
• Product Feeds - for different affiliates or merchant centers - google, FB, etc.
• Robots.txt

The process for file generation:

• The file is automtically generated in the backend on regular frequency configured for each feed type.
• The file is uploaded on the cloud based central blob.
• When requested by the search engines, the storefront simply reads the file from the blob and renders it.

Meta Information

The platform supports defining meta description providing brief summary to make it easier for the search engines to gather page information. You can define global rules which can be overwritten at a specific product, brand, category level as well.

The following meta tags are supported by the system:

• Title
• Description
• Keywords

The global rules can be setup using a simple pattern as given below:

301 and 302 Redirects

eCommerce businesses require setting up redirect rules (301, a permanent redirect, and 302, a temporary redirect), and the platform provides the capability to setup the redirect rules.

A redirect rule typically has an original url and a new url. So, if the user comes to the original url, they are redirected to the new url. It is also very important from an SEO perspective to retain the SEO rankings for each individual page and eventually the whole website. Typically, when any site migrates to a new platform, they’d need to setup redirect rules for all their old pages that could typically range into 40–50k rules being setup.

Following is an example of redirection data source, based on which redirect is performed:

To avoid making such huge data volume calls to the API on each build or page load, the implementation has been done using a hybrid approach of static redirect rules files and dynamic API-based rules as follows:

• Static JSON file

  This approach is typically useful for one-time bulk rules setup at the time of migration, and can be done more than once as well whenever we have a huge data set of rules.

  • The redirect rules file is maintained in json format as part of the storefront itself. The redirection logic is driven by Next.js Middleware that looks up the incoming request url with the data in a JSON file to evaluate the new url to redirect to.

    [{
      "originalURL": "https://www.betterstorefront.com/zodiac-tropical-print-top-ex17067",
      "newURL": "https://www.betterstorefront.com/clothing/tops"
    }, {
      "originalURL": "https://www.betterstorefront.com/zebra-print-pleat-chiffon-maxi-skirt-co-ord.html",
      "newURL": "https://www.betterstorefront.com/clothing/co-ordinates"
    }, {
      "originalURL": "https://www.betterstorefront.com/yellow-textured-handbag.html",
      "newURL": "https://www.betterstorefront.com"
    }]
    

    CopyCopied!

  • Fetch rules from API at ‘build’ time AND ‘once every day’

    The users can set up redirect rules in the commerce hub and then make the API call to fetch these rules dynamically. The Next.js storefront would make an API call at the build time to fetch the rules and setup redirect accordingly. The following API endpoint is used to fetch dynamic redirect rules created on CommerceHub:

    Operation	Endpoint	Response
    Get Redirection Rules	/api/v2/content/redirects	Details all redirection rules created for storefront - old url, new url, redirect type (determining a temporary or permanent redirect).

Schema & Markup

The platform provides support for schema & markup to organize page content making it easier for SEO engines to gather information.

Canonical Tags

The canonical tags can be setup for category, brand, product detail pages as needed in the backend and the same is populated using the API calls and rendered in the storefront.

Image Alt Tags

Image alt tags are generated for all the products using the product name itself. This helps significantly in the SEO boost for the image search.

Open Graph Schema

The storefront also supports the following Open Graph tags out of the box:

• og:title
• og:description
• og:type
• og:site_name
• og:url
• og:image