eCommerce Website SEO Checklist for Developer and Designing Team

SEO has become more important these days because most of the activities are done online. Being where your customers are is important if you want to bring more traffic and to attract more people, your website needs to rank at the top. That's where SEO comes into the picture. 

In order to make your site optimized for search engines, there are some factors you cannot afford to miss. You need to consider SEO factors while you begin building a website or you will end up with lots of money, time and efforts wasted. SEO efforts are not limited to just the SEO team but it demands efforts from every team including the developers’ team as well as designing team. So in this blog, I have mentioned a few important points from the SEO perspective that will help the developers and designers while building a website. 

SEO is huge and it is not something that can only be done by a single person. It calls for the joint and advanced efforts of the SEO team as well as the developer team. Missing out on SEO points while development can cost a website huge losses so while development of any site, the developer team needs to see that they consider the SEO factors and move forward accordingly. To make a website that is well optimized for search engines, the website development team needs to take care of a few important points. 

• Make sure that your website is speed optimized for desktop as well as mobile phones.  Check Pagespeed Insights on Google. The score should be above 80 on both mobile and desktop. (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/)
• Use layered navigation because it helps the visitors to easily find products based on category, price range, or any other available attribute. 
• Structured data is the standard format of providing information related to your page and it helps your page rank well on search engine. Add appropriate structured data code after discussing the requirements with the SEO team. 
• Use canonical tags to reduce Content Duplication. A canonical tag ("rel=canonical") is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page.     
• Don’t Neglect image Alt attributes. Search engines cannot read images so, they read images through image alt text. 
• Make sure to add Open Graph tags. Open graph meta tags are used to integrate any webpage into a social graph. With the Open Graph tags mentioned, Facebook fetches the details including the title, URL, Image, description of your blog when you share your link on facebook.
• Strategize the internal linking of the webpage after discussion with the SEO team.  
• If there are multiple languages on a website, then while switching language, the customer should be on the same page after switching language. In short, the customer should not be redirected to any other page while switching language.
• Website URL should not be dynamic. Dynamic URL is the address of a Web page with content that depends on variable parameters. It contains certain characters or character strings like '&','$',' +',' =', '?',' %'. Sometimes search engines do not index dynamic URLs because dynamic URLs are not SEO friendly.
• Images should NOT be more than 500kb.
• Verify that no page contains the no-index, no-follow tag. If any page contains ‘NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW’ tag, then search engines will not index that page and due to this your page will not appear in search engines result.
• On a live website, always keep all the pages with ‘index,follow’. 
• Redirects should be proper - http, https, www & without www. 
• Don’t change the URL of the products and categories. 
• When making changes, make sure that the designing factors of the website are not affected. 
• Whenever there are any changes made, verify that the changes are made in all the stores (multi-store/language). 
• On development/beta website, ensure that all pages contain ‘NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW’ tag & implement ht-password. Google will not index beta website pages which contain ‘NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW’ tag.
• Ensure that no page or resource is blocked.
• Make sure you have added proper disallow directives to robots.txt file for giving instruction about your site to web robots. Robots.txt is a text file that tells web robots which pages on your site to crawl and which not to crawl. 
• Generate sitemap.xml file with proper format and add it in the root directory of your website. If you have multiple stores in your website, then make sitemaps after discussing with the SEO team. (https://www.sitemaps.org/)
• Do not forget to add proper information in Title Tag, H1 Tags, and Meta description because it displays in SERP and encourage users to click on that and come to your site. 
• Before making the site live, check for any broken links and 404 errors in any automated tool. Also, verify that all redirects work proper.  

Great SEO friendly website design is the aim of any eCommerce site owner.  Along with good content, a website requires a good design which is user-friendly and well optimized. Sometimes, there are small designing factors that make a big difference in terms of SEO and traffic. SEO requires skills related to web design and through that website performs well in search engines. Below mentioned are some points that need to be considered by the website designers for SEO friendly website design. 

• Use breadcrumbs for navigation purpose. Through Breadcrumbs, users will know where they are on your website. 
• A description should not be inside a tab. 
• Content in form of text should not be loaded by Ajax. The whole content should appear at once when the site is opened. 
• If the desktop design is boxed, don’t use the same on mobile design.
• It’s okay to leave out some elements of desktop design in mobile.
• Make sure you have the Mobile responsive design of your website because search engine bots also check it for ranking. 
• CTA/Add to cart button should be the most highlighted element on the page. 
• Description area should not look plain. 
• If possible, don’t use the category path for product URLs on bigger websites. 
• Search should be quick and efficient.
• Search URLs should be deindexed because this type of URLs contain ‘&’, ‘$’, ‘+’, ‘=’, ‘?’, ‘%’ characters which are not SEO friendly.
• The checkout process should be simple and easy and should not use any popups or ambiguous words.
• Display the shipping rates on the product page.