Blog posts tagged with 'search engine optimization'

Over the past 2 years, site loading speed has become an important factor for SEO. Google is placing so much attention to it that they actually published the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to help people guage their site speed. Site speed is even more important for e-commerce platforms like nopCommerce, because buying decision can happen in split second. Often time, if an e-commerce site is not loaded fast enough, potential buyers may leave the site resulting in loss of sales.

And lost of sales is the last thing every site owners wished. That's why CDN (aka Content Delivery Network) has gained popularity over the years. 

So what exactly is a CDN? CDN is a network of servers located around the world that take care of one thing - to ensure fast delivery of static content such as images (JPG, PNG, GIF), CSS and JavaScripts.

So why is it so important? If you think about it, static files actually makes up about 80% of a web page. If static files cannot be delivered in a consistently quick manner, site speed will be greatly affected.

But most site owners are not convinced to deploy CDN on their e-commerce stores, usually due to the following reasons...

You probably know that SSL / HTTPS is one of the "must-haves" for all e-commerce stores. Not only does it offer an extra layer of protection to the store users, it also results in higher SEO (Search Engine Optimization) ranking!

Yes, Google actually takes this into account. So it's very important to implement SSL / HTTPS on your nopCommerce stores.

In this video tutorial (transcripts prepared), I am going to show you step-by-step how you can get SSL cirtificate for FREE! I'll also show you how to install it on your server (taking Azure App Services as example).

We at Pro nopCommerce like writing blog posts and tutorials about nopCommerce themes, nopCommerce plugins and nopCommerce customizations. But sometimes we can get overwhelmed by works that we have very little time to write blog posts ourselves!

In view of this, we are happy to feature Robert Bourne in this blog post, who happens to be our first guest blogger! Kudos to Robert!

Below is what Robert has to say in our second installment of nopCommerce SEO Pitfalls and How To Solve Them.

Being a popular e-commerce platform, it is very common for store owners to want to migrate to nopCommerce for its powerful features.

One common problem developers face is to migrate old, existing links (from some other e-commerce platforms) to new links (nopCommerce). Especially for old sites which are already getting tons of traffics and are having very good SEO rankings, it is very important to make sure the old URLs are 301-redirected to new nopCommerce URLs.

If it's static URLs (e.g. those for content pages), you can already use IIS URL Rewrite to do the migration manually. But the problem arises when it comes to product and category urls. Because the URLs are dynamic (and there are tons of those URLs), it is usually impractical to manually add URL Rewrite entries one-by-one.

Take the following URLs for example:

• http://oldsite.com/product-slug-one-p1234.htm
• http://oldsite.com/product-slug-two-p4567.htm
• http://oldsite.com/category-slug-one-c12.htm
• http://oldsite.com/category-slug-two-c34.htm

If you look at the URLs, they are pretty dynamic. Product URLs follow a pattern of {product-slug}-p{product-id}.htm. Category links also follow a similar pattern.

And to make the problem worse (which happens very often), old product IDs (and category IDs) do not correspond to new product IDs. That means in old system, product ID 1234 is product ID 4321 in new system.

So the question now is - how can we make sure old URLs, such as http://oldsite.com/product-slug-one-p1234.htm, will be 301-redirected to new nopCommerce URLs, such as http://nopcommercesite.com/product-one-new-slug?

nopCommerce is a superb e-commerce platform, there's no doubt about it. But one thing that it doesn't perform that well is in the area of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). And guess what? You can invest as many dollars as you like on social media or PPC (pay-per-click), but in the long term you are going to rely heavily on SEO to do the trick for you. SEO is not someting you can afford to miss.

This article serves as the starter of a series documenting various nopCommerce SEO problems and how you can tackle them to enjoy an SEO-friendly webstore. First of all, let's begin with something simple: Meta Description tag.