DEV Community: IceCube Digital

Crucial WordPress Site Settings for SEO Success

IceCube Digital — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 11:26:08 +0000

WordPress is currently one of the most SEO-friendly content management systems available. You can do numerous things to improve your SEO if you have a WordPress website. However, you may unknowingly harm your site's ranking if you are not cautious.

This post will walk you through essential settings to consider for your WordPress website if you want to maximize its SEO potential.

Security is an often overlooked but critical consideration in WordPress SEO services. In addition to general SEO settings, this blog will cover necessary security settings that can help prevent negative SEO attacks.

1. Set up the Homepage and Blog Settings

Before creating pages and posts, ensure your homepage and blog pages are set up and ready to go. Because your homepage is the first thing people see when they visit your site, you want to make an excellent first impression. It may appear to be a minor point, but it is critical.

Similarly, your blog is an excellent way to connect with your users and grow an engaged following. Creating these essential pages before you begin adding content increases your chances of creating a successful website that people will enjoy visiting.

WordPress makes your most recent posts page the default home page. You must choose 'A static page' and specify which page is your home page and which is your blog page.

2. Optimize Permalinks

When creating a blog, you must decide how you want your URLs to be structured.

A scalable URL taxonomy will make crawling and indexing much easier for search engines, as well as make it more user-friendly. As a result, taking the time to select a permalink structure for your blog, in the long run, is worthwhile. There are several options, so spend some time experimenting to determine what works best for you and your blog.

You can use whatever structure works best for your website, but I recommend using a custom structure rather than a date-based one. A permalink structure that uses the month and day or the day and name can result in a complicated site architecture.

3. Dynamic Sitemap

A dynamic sitemap is a must-have for any website. It assists search engines in indexing your site and makes it easier for users to find the information they seek.

On the other hand, a static sitemap is much less effective, can be challenging to maintain, and does not provide the same level of scalability.

Many plugins provide dynamic sitemap options with a variety of customizations. So, if you want to improve the SEO of your website, a dynamic sitemap is the way to go.

4. Set up an Automated Image Optimizer

Optimized images are required for maintaining a fast WordPress site. The SEO benefits of optimizing images are numerous, ranging from faster website speed to higher search engine rankings. Using a plugin is the simplest way to optimize your images.

Many WordPress plugins will optimize your images as you upload them. While some are paid, many free options are equally effective.

5. Set up Default Title and Meta Descriptions

Many SEO plugins provide default settings for meta descriptions and titles, ensuring that all new pages are optimized for search engines. It is a lifesaver for large websites with many pages and teams that need to become more familiar with SEO best practices. Utilizing these tools ensures that your website is visible and found by potential visitors.

6. Protect Your SEO with These WordPress Security Settings

Website security depends heavily on SEO. It has always been important, but as the internet grows increasingly integrated into our daily lives, it is becoming even more crucial.

Websites are now used for everything from online banking to online shopping, and the repercussions of having a non-secure website can be severe.

Websites with malware infections and those that might be engaging in social engineering are subject to Google penalties. If your website is secure, you can avoid losing out on potential clients and search engine results. Therefore, website security is a crucial component of SEO and should be considered.

7. Ensure All Users Have Secure Passwords with 2FA

Your WordPress site will be difficult to hack if you use secure passwords and turn on two-factor authentication (2FA).

Massive password lists containing millions of the most popular passwords are used by hackers who conduct brute-force login assaults. These password lists may become useless if the password is complex.

Having 2FA enabled can be an additional measure to stop hackers from accessing your site if they manage to steal your password.

2FA settings are available in several security plugins.

8. Set Up Limit Login Attempts

A brute force attack occurs when an attacker repeatedly enters various character combinations to guess a user's password. Setting a limit on the number of login attempts on your WordPress website can help avoid brute force assaults.

After a predetermined number of unsuccessful login attempts, this security feature will block an attacker's IP address, making it more challenging for them to access your website.

9. Set Up Recurring Backups

Don't disregard a reliable website security strategy in the current digital era. Ensuring you take daily backups is one of the best things you can do to secure your website. You will have a recent website backup that you may restore if your site is hacked or suffers from any other security incident.

Even though many plugins provide this function, hiring a WordPress host to handle backups is frequently advisable. You can be confident that your backups are constantly maintained in this manner.

10. Set User Permissions

As the WordPress site manager, it is your responsibility to ensure the site functions correctly and that everyone who needs access has it. Nevertheless, not all stakeholders require access to every part of the site.

By adjusting user rights, you may grant each stakeholder access to the required areas, maintaining site organization and preventing unwanted changes.

Additionally, you should routinely check user permissions to ensure they are still accurate.

Conclusion

Ensuring your website's foundation is solid will become more crucial as it receives more visits. For WordPress SEO to begin, the settings described in this article must get applied. By implementing these suggestions for your WooCommerce development services, you are making significant progress toward developing a scalable website to expand your company.

With our team of Boston SEO experts, we are here to serve you with a comprehensive range of SEO services to serve your business website. In case if you have any queries or questions, get in touch with us, and we will answer your queries as soon as possible.

Common Magento SEO Mistakes and How to avoid them

IceCube Digital — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 11:54:44 +0000

For any e-commerce business, it is very important to know what their customers search about to know the search capability of their store, and most importantly to make their products easily available in search engines. For all these, you need a strong SEO tool that ensures your platform ranks higher in organic search.

Magento SEO Services does not hammer with key elements while focusing on SEO. In fact, Magento ecommerce platform is filled with features that work in favor of SEO ranking. From integrated content pages to independent page titles, Magento has many features that help to supercharge your ecommerce store.

Magento has many benefits enabling businesses to deal with high traffic and huge sales. In haste or due to lack of experience, you may not know how to fully utilize Magento SEO Services, so in this blog, we are going to discuss the mistakes which you may make and if you do how to avoid them.

Common Magento SEO Mistakes and Tips for Overcoming Them

1. Forgetting To Change the Default Meta Tags

If you are a beginner then, first of all, you need to change the default Magento setup, as it comes with limitations and lacks advanced features. Default Magento does not have the capabilities to boost up your SEO rankings on search engines.

For getting better SEO results, you need proper ‘Title Tags’ and ‘Meta Description’ but with the default setup of Magento, it's not going to work. Altering the default, Magento setup will give you a better click-through rate, apart from having unique and engaging Meta Descriptions for your store.

2. Neglecting the Importance of Alt Tags

Magento can’t identify the importance of product images on its own. Then what is the point of spending hours in creating a high-quality image? If you want to make your high-quality product image work for higher SEO, then you must write a specific, relevant, to-the-point description along with an appropriate ‘alt tag’ for each of your product images.

Adding an alt tag to your images on your platform will allow search engines to reach them easily and enhance your product image visibility. Moreover, alt tags play a vital role in forcing viewers to take buying decisions instantly.

3. Usage of Non-Descriptive URL

It is one of the biggest mistakes Magento ecommerce developers make when it comes to optimizing stores. Keeping a non-descriptive URL for products will delay search engine spiders to read or index your site, so reaching your target audience will be a difficult task.

Using a descriptive URL, having relevant keyword phrases in the URL will increase the indexing speed of your online store in search engines. This will make your online store URL more readable, engaging, and SEO-friendly URLs.

For example, if you are going to optimize your store URL for casual trousers for men then prefer this format.

“yourstorename.com/product/men-casual-trousers”

By following this format you can get more visitors and your web page generates more quality leads from search engines.

4. Forgetting to Change ‘robots.txt’ File

Unlike Professional SEO experts most of the store owners forget to tweak the ‘robot.txt’ this will restrict search engine spiders to crawl your site pages.

To have a better SEO ranking your website's "robots.txt" & Meta robots directives must be tweaked to the appropriate form and should place in the section of your web pages.

This ensures your web pages get INDEX and FOLLOW by search engines. Check whether your web pages have the desired robots.txt and Meta robots directive by following this.

“Accessing your System → Configuration → General → Design → HTML Head → Default robots.”

5. Ignoring rel=canonical

A prolific Magento store may have hundreds and thousands of product pages, so the chances of having duplicate content will be high. To overcome this, many store owners prefer to have their products URLs with non-descriptive elements like “? =, P-5” to limit their web pages from getting indexed in search engines.

Instead of considering non-descriptive elements store owners should make use of “rel-canonical”. The canonical link represents a master copy and limits search engines to index duplicate pages.
However, to avail better SEO ranking you need to set up canonicals correctly.

Bonus - Magento Loading Speed

Magento platform is a heavy-duty platform that makes your store takes a lot of time to load. Your store’s loading time creates an impact on its crawling in search engines.

To overcome this issue, you need to make sure to apply proactive ways to improve your store loading time. You can use a cache solution or download Magento 2 Catalog Ajax Scroll for improving your store page loading time. AJAX will load your store's next page automatically when a customer scrolls to the end of the page.

Conclusion

Businesses shouldn’t ignore these crucial mistakes of Magento SEO, as 93% of all internet activity starts with a search and thus, ignoring such mistakes will affect site performance in search engines.

Top 7 Ways To Drop Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

IceCube Digital — Wed, 19 Jun 2019 06:16:47 +0000

There’s a lot of difference in shopping at any retail store and in shopping online and this can have a major effect on the buyer’s behavior. Especially one specific behavior that happens a lot in online shopping is cart abandonment.
Imagine yourself in a departmental store, shopping in the same way as you do in online shopping. You selected the items for purchase, filled your cart and then got distracted with something else and abandoned the cart and left the store without buying anything. This won’t happen in the real world, but it happens most of the times in the eCommerce world.

Despite good products and your best-laid plans, the shoppers abandon their cart while shopping online. Just because they might get distracted with something else or they closed the tab and never returned. You can take the services of a professional SEO company to figure out ways to reduce the shopping cart abandonment at your website.

Shopping cart abandonment is a crucial problem to solve for most of the online businesses. On an average above 75% of shoppers abandon their carts without making any purchase. Though, it can’t be completely eliminated.

Here are 7 effective ways to drop shopping cart abandonment rate:

Build trust in the transaction forms – You need to establish and build your customers trust in your transaction forms. You can do this by including security logos in a prominent position. If the security logo is missing from your website or is not recognizable then most of the shoppers will hesitate in purchasing from you.
Effortless navigation between cart and store and make it easy to save carts – Make it easier for your customers to move between the cart and the website. Easy navigation between cart and store will improve the chances of checkout. In addition to this, make it easy to save carts on your website.

Though effortless navigation is required to maintain the flow and reduce the friction but it’s the hardest one to get it right. Even big retailers continuously experiment with checkout flow to optimize the process of checkout and making it easier for buyers to shop effortlessly.

Provide multiple payment options – Putting a single payment option at your website will only alienate your buyers. Single payment option act as an unnecessary obstacle. Give multiple payment options to your customers to make the process easy. Credit card payment options, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Wallet are some popular options.
Include a clear call to action on checkout pages – By improving checkout pages call to action and adding a progress indicator on the checkout pages will help a great deal in curbing the cart abandonment. Anything that prolongs the checkout process unnecessarily should be avoided in eCommerce.

By showing progress indicator on the checkout pages and adding clear and strong CTAs you will help your customers know exactly how far they are from checking out. Additionally, it assures the visitors that the process is almost done. A clear indication of the task is preferred by buyers.

Guest checkout options – Don’t force your buyers to create an account on your website. If your website fails to offer guest checkout options then it’s more likely that you will have too many cart abandonments on your website. Forcing your buyers to log in is sufficient reason for most buyers to abandon the purchase.
Be clear about all costs including shipping – Be very upfront and clear about the shipping costs and all other costs. Your customers will not appreciate any surprises in this section. Hidden costs and high shipping costs are loathed. Your customers like to choose the cheapest payment options. Be clear about all costs including the shipping costs.
Provide thumbnail images of products throughout the checkout process and quick loading pages – Providing the thumbnail images of products throughout the checkout process is an excellent grounding technique. Make sure your website pages load fast. No buyer will stay on your website for long if the website pages load slowly.

Get a clear idea of how your customers actually flow through your website to the checkout. This is quite revealing of the leakiest parts of your website’s conversion pathway. This will help you in determining your eCommerce strategy to refine your eCommerce experience.

Conclusion

No matter what you do or plan some shoppers are going to abandon their carts without making any purchase. Some other slight changes will also make a profound impact. You can identify the leaks happening in your conversion funnels.

Though, there are many reasons behind high cart abandonment like -payment failure, internet issues and many more. In cases like this remarketing can help. At the same time, it’s important to refine your sales funnel blog. As an eCommerce website development company, we can help you in implementing these ideas on your website.