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You are here: Home / Archives for XML sitemap

How to Fix Your Website Structure

April 13, 2021 By John Leave a Comment

how to fix your website structure

Have you ever considered looking at your WooCommerce store’s site structure? Probably not. After all, it doesn’t look like an urgent issue that warrants a lot of immediate attention. However, if your WooCommerce site suffers from poor structure, you could actually be hurting your SEO rankings. Odds are you are also making it difficult for your customers to navigate your site. In fact, depending on how bad your site structure is, it could be causing your customers a lot of frustration. You should make it a top priority to learn how to fix your website structure.

Why Should You Fix Your Site Structure?

If you know your site structure has problems, then do not delay. Address it right away so you can reap the benefits of following best SEO practices. If you are serious about getting on page of Google’s search results page, then you should not skimp on fixing your site structure. Not to mention, a good site structure will make it easier for your customers to navigate your site. This leads to good user experience which can increase your sales by as much as 30%.

What Does Good Site Structure Look Like?

Good site structure should look like a proper flow chart. The home page should have a link to all stand-alone pages this includes the about page, contact page, privacy policy page, pricing page, portfolio page, my account page, blog page, shop page and any other important pages.

Blog posts should make full use of blog categories and blog tags, if necessary. The same goes for products. Make full use of product categories and blog tags. Your blog categories and product categories should never have the same name as they will cannibalize each other. They will compete with each other for SEO rankings. Also, categories and tags should not be the same.

What You Should Do to Fix Site Structure?

Do a Content Audit

Before you go about fixing your WooCommerce store’s structure, it is important to understand your content. You can do a content audit to better understand your content assets and determine how to optimize your website’s structure. After doing a content audit and getting a clear picture of your content assets, the next step is to identify site structure problems.

Identify Site Structure Problems

Check and Fix Your Navigation Menu

Check all your navigation menus. From a user perspective, do they make sense? Do you use dropdown menus? More important menu items should go to your main navigation menu. Less important links to pages like Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy, Terms and Conditions should go to your secondary or footer menu. Having a privacy policy and cookie policy page is essential if you want to comply with GDPR regulations which you should.

You can even have people try using your site and ask them feedback about your site’s navigation.

What Should Be on Your Main Navigation

Your main navigation should contain your most important pages or all pages you want your visitors to have easy access to. We recommend your Shop Page, Blog Page, About Page, Contact Page, or depending on your business, a portfolio or pricing page.

Find 404 Errors

Isn’t annoying when you go a certain website, you click a link and then land at a 404 error page?

Google has been putting more attention on good user experience and having 404 errors on your website is not good user experience. Fixing 404 errors should be included in your website maintenance tasks. You can find 404 errors by using this Broken Link Checker tool. Once you determine which links lead to a 404 error, remove that link or point it to the appropriate page.

Redirect 404 Errors

In some cases, your broken links could be because of a change in your website’s URL structure. In this case, you might want to redirect all your all URLs to the new URLs. Make sure you use a 301 redirect. You can use the Redirection plugin to set up your redirects. For SEO purposes, it is important to set up a 301 redirect to tell search engines that the old page has been permanently moved to a new address.

Update or Remove Outdated Content

It is important for SEO to have fresh content so you should be updating your content regularly. In some cases, you might find that some of your old content may no longer be relevant so you can either update or delete that page. If you have updated content, you should redirect the deleted page to the updated content.

Make the Most of Your Internal Links

Proper internal linking creates a smooth flow between all your site’s pages. When you’re writing a blog post and you mention another blog post that is related to your current post, link to it. When you mention a specific page on your site, link to it. When you mention a specific product, link to it. Google appreciates good internal links.

Learn How to Properly Use Posts and Pages

Think of categories as a file cabinet where you place files that belong together so everything remains organized. So if a user is interested in a specific kind of product or blog post, the user can find them all in one place. Tags, on the other hand, are used differently. You can think of tags as the index section of a book. Properly tagging your posts and products makes it easier for users to find posts or products that mention a specific keyword or topic.

Should You Revise Your Categories?

If you found out that you’ve been using your categories all wrong and want to revise it to make it clearer, you should do it sooner rather than later. Making sure your category structure is optimum will go a long way in helping your SEO. Just make sure you properly redirect everything to the new URL.

Changing the Permalink Structure

By default, WordPress sets your permalink structure to something that is not optimal. It is ideal to have a custom structure or a post name structure. It should be one of the first things you should change when you create a new WordPress site. So if you didn’t do it before and now have hundreds of posts and pages, then changing your site structure could become a major issue.

When you change your site structure, you will lose many external links pointing to your site and that’s a big SEO disaster. You have to make sure you make proper 301 redirects to the new URLs.

It might be a lot of work but you will soon reap better SEO rankings. If you already have good content, the benefits of optimizing your permalink structure could be significant. This means you should not skip doing this.

Resubmit Your Site Map

When you finish all your site structure optimizations, you should resubmit your sitemap to major search engines. That would be Bing and Google. Resubmitting your sitemaps ensure that search engines index the changes in your site structure.

Have you checked your site structure lately? What problems did you find?

Filed Under: How-To Articles Tagged With: 404 error, best practices, content marketing, navigation, SEO strategy, woocommerce seo, WordPress SEO, XML sitemap

How to Set Up WordPress SEO by Yoast for WooCommerce

March 26, 2015 By John Leave a Comment

How to Set Up WordPress SEO by Yoast

The WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast with over 16 million downloads is easily one of the best plugins that you need to have on your website. Whether it’s a personal blog, an e-commerce store, or a company website, you should have this plugin. In fact, many WordPress developers have WordPress SEO by Yoast in their list of plugins to install each time they create a new website. Many of you may already know a bit (or a lot) about SEO and that’s okay. That just means you’ll make better use of this plugin. And for those that don’t know much about SEO, don’t worry. The plugin is user friendly. I’ll walk you through all the functionalities so you’ll know how to set up WordPress SEO by Yoast for WooCommerce.

Installing WordPress SEO by Yoast for WooCommerce

To install the plugin, head over to the plugin developer’s website. Once there, download the plugin and upload it at the plugin page of your WordPress Dashboard.

You can search for the plugin on the plugin repository by going to your WordPress Dashboard. Click on “Plugins” and then “Add New”. From there just use the search bar to search for the WordPress SEO plugin and click on “Install Now”.

SEO Plugin Especially for WooCommerce

For WooCommercestore owners, getting the premium Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin is a worthwhile buy. When used with the WordPress SEO plugin, you can better optimize your WooCommerce store. It enhances the existing Open Graph and Twitter Card enhancements in the WordPress SEO plugin. It will also optimize your sitemap for an ecommerce store setup, among other things. For a guide on how to set this up, check out this post.

Optimizing Product Pages for SEO for WooCommerce

The single most important function of the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast is its ability to help you optimize your blog posts and pages for SEO. That includes WooCommerce products. WooCommerce products work just like posts/pages so it is the same procedure. So when I say page or post, the same applies to WooCommerce products.

Optimizing posts/pages is easy enough. You can do it right after you finish creating the post/page in WordPress. When you’re on the post or page, just scroll down and there will be a section named “WordPress SEO by Yoast”. On the General tab, you’ll see a Snippet Preview. This is how your post/page will show up on the Google search results page. And the fun part is that you can edit how your post will show up. First off, you set a focus keyword. This should be the keyword that you want your blog post or page to rank for. What you should be aiming for is to have this focus keyword in:

  • the title of your article
  • in the body of the content especially in the first paragraph
  • and the meta description which you can set in the field where it says meta description

If you got that all right, you should be seeing all green below the focus keyword that you set.

post-optimization

You can also click on the Page Analysis tab to get more information and other suggestions to improve your post/page. You don’t have to follow all the suggestions. But following everything will help increase the quality of your post/page.

page-analysis

You can tweak a bunch of other settings under the Advanced tab so feel free to change them as you see fit. You can even change how your post would appear when it gets shared on social media under the Social tab.

Optimizing WooCommerce Product Categories for SEO

woocommerce-product-categoriesSimilarly, you can also optimize WooCommerce product categories for SEO. Just go to “Products” and click on “Categories” Edit the category that you want to optimize. When you scroll down to the bottom of the “Edit Category” page, you’ll see a section called Yoast SEO Settings. Fill in the SEO Title and SEO Description fields and click on Update.

optimizing-product-categories

Unlike when optimizing product pages, you don’t get to set a focus keyword. However, you can still target a keyword by including the keyword in the SEO Title and SEO Description fields. You should also put it in the Category Description field above the Yoast SEO Settings section.

Note that not all themes are able to display product category description on the category page but if your theme supports this function, the text that you put will appear on your product category page.

product-description

Verifying Your Website with Search Console

Verifying your website with different Google Search Console tools is important if you want your site crawled. It will have your website crawled by spiders. I don’t mean actual spiders. I mean search engine spiders that index websites on different search engines. Verifying with different webmaster tools can be a complex process but this is made easy with the WordPress SEO plugin.

Linking with Social Media Profiles

You can connect your website with your social media pages with the WordPress SEO plugin. You can do this by going to “SEO” and then clicking on “Social”. Here there are three tabs: Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

How to Connect Facebook

Linking Facebook to your site allows you access to Facebook Insights. If you already have a Facebook page, you just need to get the URL of your Facebook page. Copy the URL and then paste it where it says “Facebook Page URL”. You can then set the administrators for your page by clicking on Add Facebook Admin. If you are an advanced user, you can tweak a bunch of other settings. When you’re done, just click on “Save Changes”.

facebook

How to Set Up Twitter Cards

Do you use Twitter? Have you ever seen links in Twitter that show a snippet of the page that it links to? That’s called a Twitter card and you can enable that on your website using WordPress SEO. The usual thing is that enabling Twitter cards would call for you to add some lines of code to your header. But WordPress SEO eliminates the need for that.

twitter

How do you do this? On the Social section of the plugin, click on Twitter. Fill in your Twitter username on the appropriate field. Specify the kind of Twitter card that you want to have then click on “Save Changes”. You’re not done yet. You still need to confirm your Twitter card. Head over to this link. Specify the URL and click on “Preview Card”. After that, click on “Request Approval” and fill out the form. Finally, click on another “Request Approval”.

Soon, you’ll be able to see Twitter cards on your Twitter links.

The premium YoastWooCommerce SEO plugin will further help you optimize your Twitter Cards if you have that.

How to Connect Google+

To connect your website with Google+ means setting your Google+ profile as the publisher of your content with the “rel=publisher” markup. “Rel=publisher” is an authorship markup which connects websites to Google+ pages (not personal profiles).

To connect your Google+ company page, head over to the “Social” section of the plugin and click on Google+. Fill out the field with the URL of your company page on Google+ and click on “Save Changes”.

google+

You might have heard of “rel=author” which links the content to the Google+ profile of the author. When implemented in the proper way, “rel=author” should show a snippet of the content with a photo of the author in the SERPs page. If you’re a writer and you’re hyped by that, I’d hate to burst your bubble but “rel=author” is no longer supported by Google. You can read more about it here.

Improving Sharing on Pinterest

Pinterest is another social media platform that’s worth mentioning. It has great potential for e-commerce stores. Why? Because Pinterest is image-based. The YoastWooCommerce SEO plugin makes sharing on Pinterest more worthwhile. After setting Twitter products and Schema Open Graph additions, your pins on Pinterest will start to show in a different way. In most cases, WooCommerce product will show up like posts. But with the plugin configured, your products will show up as “products”. They will show product related information such as price and variations.

Implementing Sitemaps with WordPress SEO

In a nutshell, sitemaps communicate with search engines to let the latter know when there are changes to the website. There are a lot of plugins that lets you create a sitemap. If you are already using the WordPress SEO plugin, just use the built-in sitemap module. Looking for another plugin just add an extra load to your server.

sitemaps

To get your sitemap, go to the plugin’s “XML Sitemaps” tab and then tick on the first box to enable sitemaps and click on “Save Changes”. There are a bunch of settings that you can tweak. You can have a look at them and change them as you please. They are pretty much self-explanatory.

You also might want to get the WooCommerce SEO plugin, which was mentioned above a couple of times. This removes some unnecessary bits from your sitemap in automatic fashion.

Check out our post on how to create a sitemap for your WooCommerce store to learn about sitemaps and other means of creating it.

Permalink Settings

Permalink settings all have to do with your URLs. I would not recommend changing any of the settings here but you are free to check them out and change them as you please.

Enabling Breadcrumbs with WordPress SEO

Breadcrumbs, when enabled, helps users identify where they are on your website. It also helps search engines determine your website’s structure. See the image below.  Where the yellow arrow is pointing at, that’s the breadcrumbs.

Enabling breadcrumbs on your website is simpler than snapping your fingers. Just go to SEO and then click on Internal Links. You should see a box that says “Enable Breadcrumbs”. So just tick that box and save. There are a few settings that you can tweak so just change them up as you need.

breadcrumbs

Did we miss anything? Or do you have any questions about the WordPress SEO plugin? Let us know in the comments.

Filed Under: How-To Articles, SEO For E-Commerce Tagged With: blog, breadcrumbs, content marketing, Google Webmaster Tools, Google+, how-to, navigation, optimizations, plugins, SEO tools, social media, Twitter, WooCommerce, WordPress, WordPress SEO, XML sitemap, Yoast

How to Create a Sitemap for your WooCommerce Store

March 19, 2015 By John 2 Comments

sitemapYou might have heard about XML sitemaps and that it’s good for your website’s SEO but don’t really know what it is. Or maybe you don’t know how to create a sitemap for your WooCommerce store. We can help with that. For starters, Google defines a sitemap as:

…a file where you can list the web pages of your site to tell Google and other search engines about the organization of your site content.

In short, a sitemap tells search engine crawlers about the structure of your site. Whenever you add something new to your website, whether that’s a new blog post, a new page or a new WooCommerce product, your sitemap is updated and communicates with web crawlers to tell search engine that there is something new on your website.

Even without a sitemap, the content on your website will still eventually be crawled by search engine crawlers but if the structure of your website is not well-organized, some pages may not be indexed. Also, having a sitemap will make crawling your website easier and much sooner. And if you have a new website, you probably don’t have a lot of other websites linking to your pages so it is highly likely that some of your pages may not get indexed. Having a sitemap almost ensures that all your pages get indexed.

How to Generate a Sitemap for Your WordPress Site

There are a couple of plugins that you can use to create a sitemap for your e-commerce website. We’ll list them down here.

How to Create a Sitemap Using WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress SEO by Yoast is the all-in-one plugin for your SEO needs. It is easily one of the best SEO plugins in the WordPress plugin repository. It has a lot of useful features and that includes the creation of a sitemap. If you are already using WordPress SEO by Yoast, then look nowhere else for creating your own XML sitemap. If you are not using WordPress SEO yet, I would suggest joining the bandwagon that is unless you are already using an SEO plugin that works well for you.

To enable XML sitemaps in WordPress SEO, go to SEO and click on XML sitemaps. Afterwards, just tick the box where it says “Check this box to enable XML sitemap functionality” and then “Save Changes”. When that’s done, just click on the button below and you will be taken to your sitemap.

sitemaps

How to Create a Sitemap Using Google XML Sitemaps

Creating a sitemap with the Google XML Sitemaps plugin is very easy. Simply download and install the plugin here. After you activate the plugin, just head over to Settings and click on XML-Sitemap. You should see a section that indicates the URL for your sitemap. There are a bunch of other settings that you can tweak. The default settings are good as is but if you want to change anything depending on your needs, feel free to do so.

google-xml-sitemaps

How to Create a Sitemap Using XML Sitemaps

To create a sitemap using the XML Sitemaps plugin, simply install the plugin from this link. Activate the plugin and head over to yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. That’s your sitemap. There are a few settings that you can tweak if you head over to Settings and click on XML Sitemaps.

xml-sitemaps

Adding a Link to Sitemap for Your WooCommerce Store

adding-sitemap-to-footerMost SEO experts say that adding a link to your sitemap on your website does not serve any purpose since the search engines find the sitemap through the robots.txt file or when you manually submit the sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools or Bing’s. Some disagree however and mention that having a link in the footer adds value.

If you do want to add a link to your sitemap on your WordPress site’s footer, it is very easy to do. Just go to Appearance and click on Widgets. Afterwards, drag a text widget to the footer where you want to have the link. Just link your sitemap using HTML code.

If you are not sure how to do this, use the code below and just replace the URL with your sitemap’s URL:

<a href=”http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml”>XML Sitemap</a>

Submitting your Sitemap to Search Engines

When you get your sitemap ready, you should submit it to search engines using Webmaster Tools. Before you do this however, you need to verify your website with Webmaster Tools. You can check our post about the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast which has links to some useful resources that can help you verify your site if you haven’t done that yet.

How to Submit Your Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools

To submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, log in to your account and click on the website that you want to add a sitemap to. On the left sidebar, you should see Site Configuration, click that and then click on Sitemaps. There should be an Add/Test sitemap button in the upper right corner. Add your sitemap and then click on Submit.

How to Submit Your Sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools

To submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools, log in to your account and click on Sitemaps. Then click on Submit a Sitemap. A text box should appear where you can specify the URL to your sitemap. Save your settings.

The Verdict: Which one is for you?

Between the XML sitemap plugins mentioned above, which one is for you? WordPress SEO by Yoast has a ton of other features and is one of, if not the best SEO plugin for WordPress. If you are already using this plugin for your SEO, then there’s no reason to get another plugin to get a sitemap. You’ll just be adding extra bloat to your site by going with another plugin. Between Google XML Sitemap and XML Sitemap Plugin, there’s not much of a difference. Both are easy to set up but Google XML Sitemaps has a slight advantage for having more options such as:

  • Automatically notifying search engines whenever you post new content
  • Creation of an HTML sitemap
  • Compressing the sitemap
  • Adding the sitemap URL to the robots.txt file

Got some questions about sitemaps? Let us know in the comments.

Filed Under: How-To Articles, SEO For E-Commerce Tagged With: Google Webmaster Tools, Google+, how-to, plugins, WooCommerce, WordPress SEO, XML sitemap, Yoast

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