Here are a few tips to get your SEO right on your Shopify store.

Shopify SEO

• If you had a site/store previously, redirect the old pages to the new pages on shopify admin.
• Redirect non-www to www on shopify admin
• Set your collections url names to match keywords you are targeting.
• Remove standard footer links and replace with a few keyword links to internal pages.
• Get your own domain name, this is essential!
• Add regular content to your blog with internal links to different products and shopping categories.
• Change the name of your store to include keywords you’re targeting.
• Add Google analytics to your store and add to Google webmaster tools.
• Add some welcome homepage text with a short description including links to internal pages.

Some great Shopify apps to add are…

• Marketbrain -  essential for tracking sales, stock, etc
• Jilt – Auto email people who abandoned their cart
• Optimizely – Easy A/B testing
• Dealy – Automate daily deals and deals to facebook/twitter
• Minimum Orders – Make sure people don’t buy a £2 product with free shipping

Hope that’s helpful and contact me if you’d like some more traffic from Google.

Enjoy.

UPDATE…

The day after this visit from Google the site had a penalty applied, so it must be manual. The dodgy action taking was 301′ing a old domains with links to the domain in question.

From Datadial

Keyword stuffing

The use of keywords and key phrases is the most important part of search engine optimization; without keywords, search engines wouldn’t know how or where to find your content. However, many website owners and content writers have tried to ‘cheat’ the search engines by keyword stuffing in a bid to gain higher rankings. Keyword stuffing happens when you overload the content, title, and meta tags with keywords or phrases to the point where there is no coherent sentence structure left. Search engines like Google and Bing have become wise to this, and many will simply ignore pages that appear to be stuffed with keywords.

Unscrupulous backlinks

Another important part of SEO is building a reservoir of quality backlinks to your content. Backlinks are links that are placed on other web pages linking back to your content. Search engines use the amount of quality backlinks connected to your content to help calculate your ranking in search results. Underhand techniques to increase backlinks, such as using link exchanges or setting up websites purely to act as a repository for backlinks will result in your content being ignored or banned by search engines. Make sure all your backlinks are from a reputable source.

Poor quality content

Search engines are becoming evermore sophisticated in their approach to sifting through content. Content that doesn’t make sense, or that contains so many errors that the text is unreadable, will often be ignored or demoted in the rankings. The search engine may assume that your content is just a mix of blatant keywords loosely strung together, and of no real value to readers. Creating quality content is the only way to keep the search engines happy.

Here are some tips for optimising for Google Base

1. Long product descriptions win!
2. Unique product descriptions are better, with a decent keyword density
3. Exact match on product take wins
4. Set your product category to the closest match possible,  example, for iPad accessories, don’t just choose accessories, drill down to handheld and pda accessories

Enjoy.

Some examples may be :

$ google blogger post –blog “My blog” –tags “python, googlecl, development” my_post.html
$ google calendar add “Lunch with Jason tomorrow at noon”
$ google docs edit –title “Shopping list” –editor vim

Visit GoogleCL for more info.

Enjoy.