If you are the proud owner of a partner shop or online catalogue from L-SHOP-TEAM, you naturally want many people to visit your website. The first visitors are usually friends or acquaintances who leave the first footprint. But how does online marketing work and what settings can i as a Partnershop-Operator manipulate so that i can be found by unknown peolpe. In this series we look into this matter and prepare our Partnershop for Google.
Based on some settings we would like to show you how to set up your partner shop to be search engine friendly (SEO friendly). We will take into account the requirements and general conditions of the Google search engine, as Google has the largest presence worldwide. Although other search engines, such as Bing, are getting more and more attention, they are still far behind the search engine giant.
We work here with a partner shop of the L-SHOP-TEAM and therefore you don’t need to worry about many areas, bacause they have been optimized by the L-SHOP-TEAM in a search engine friendly way. For example, we do not need to edit the page titles of categories and articles. The article descriptions are also maintained centrally by us. This eliminates many tiring points and allows us to concentrate on the points that are relevant to you.
Prefix, Suffix and the magic potion
For the romans among us: don’t worry. Prefix and suffix aren’t gauls but important parameters when naming the shop. They are the namesake of the pages and should generally describe the content of the entire shop. The prefix and the suffix form the title in the source code.
You set the prefix and the suffix in the administration area through MASTER SETTINGS -> Core Settings -> tab: SEO. Here we can set the values for the respective languages. We can see the set names for the browser tab:
WEARHOUSE | Your Partner for Streetwear | purchase online
Composition: [Prefix] | [Titel of the site] | [Suffix]
Another special feature of the prefix is that it gives the logo its name. An important basic rule of Google is: the higher up something is, the more important it must be. Since the logo is on the top of the page and Google only sees the name and not the image itself, the prefix should be treated as the name of the shop. Furthermore, the logo appears on every page and is therefore one of the first values Google sees. It is important to make sure that the page title is not too long. In total it should be 55 characters.
I would like to give you a few examples if you are not sure what to enter here:
| Prefix | Suffix | Front Page Title |
| WORKWEARHOUSE | puchase online | Your partner for workwear |
| GASTROSHOP | order now | We dress cooks |
Content is King!
If content is king then the CMS pages are the royal court. With online marketing and its onpage optimization you will not get around the content i.e. the text content. An online shop generates an immense amount of content simply from the item description. Therefore it is difficult for Google to recognize the content of a shop next to the offered articles. Article descriptions are also of enormous importance and are naturally part of the optimization process. However, in order to explain your personal touch, such as your service or your target group for Google, we can use the CMS in the partner shop (CMS: Content Management System). As the name suggests, we can create content pages with the help of the CMS system i.e. specifically created pages with individual content. The goal of the CMS pages is to let the content get more recognition by Google, it is recommended to use one image at max here and work with plenty of text. The created content should also largely describe your service and affect your target group. We will explain in another blog entry how to create such content and select the appropriate keywords.
If you look at the pages in the admin area CUSTOMER INFO-> CMS Pages, you will notice that L-SHOP-TEAM already delivers some CMS pages. The background for this is that the shop outputs the content for certain areas out of these CMS pages. We can also add more pages by clicking on Create New Content on the bottom bar, fill out the form and save. It is important to find a suitable title and fill the content with (SEO-)text. You must also select Upper Menu to display the content page on the right side of the Main Menu. When you are finished in the tab Main we can switch to the tab SEO. Please do not forget to save!
Maybe you have already heard the term SEO links. A SEO link is basically a readable and understandable link in the browser’s address bar. For the purpose of not having links like this …/2vki7jcoio0ce0uq52415dudd3&shp/ for your content but something like this /your-content/, we can determine the SEO link here. Under SEO URL you can enter the URL that represents the content of the page the most – like a book title. Also you need to check the Fixed URL box before saving. It is important to set a SEO link for each language you have activated.
Under the SEO URL you will find the input options for the meta tags. Meta tags are areas in the source code that allow you to summarize your content for search engines by using keywords. Five keywords are sufficient for one content page.
For example: workwear, workwear printing, Berlin
You can summarize the content briefly and concisely in the description text. The entered text will be displayed in the search results. The motto “less is more” applies here too. 160 characters should be more than enough.
For example: Finishing of workwear in Dortmund. Qualitatively and affordable.
After these steps you have already optimized your partner shop in terms of onpage. However, online marketing is not limited to onpage optimization. With further blog entries we will accompany you to create an online marketing mix and thus prepare you for the big topic of online marketing in the partner shop of L-SHOP-TEAM.