Improving Organic Search Engine Rankings

Organic Search Engine Rankings refers to where your page appears when someone types in keywords in a search engine such as Google. Your site needs to be optimized to get the best possible ranking.

Your typical Shopify theme is already compatible with the technical aspects of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), following the design guidelines that make it easy for search engines to index your content, but first they have to know about your site.

Submitting your Site

To get started, you need to submit your site to the search engine. Here are the links:

• http://www.google.com/webmasters
• http://www.bing.com/webmaster/
• https://developer.apps.yahoo.com/

Once you have submitted your site it is added to the queue so that their "spiders" will index it - normally after a few days.

Tuning your Keywords

While you are waiting, you might want to spend a few minutes tuning your page content to your specific keywords (you have specific keywords right?). You can get an idea of what the search engines are seeing by using this free tool: http://www.seomoz.org/term-extractor. It will analyze the content of your page and extracts the terms that the search engines are seeing. Hint: it doesn't hurt to run this tool over your competitors' sites as well, to see what they are using.

High quality content, tuned to your keywords, is the single most important factor for improving your organic search results.

Using Paid Search

You can also use paid search (i.e adwords aka PPC) to help your organic rankings by raising your quality score. For example, you can run a low budget adwords campaign that uses your keywords. Your initial quality score will be around 4-5 if you have decent content. If you follow the adwords help on improving the quality score to at least a 7 you will find your organic ranking will improve as well.

Linking

Another critical factor in your organic rankings is how many sites are linking to you. Search engines consider links as votes, but not all links are equal. An "authoritative" site, i.e. one that has a lot of links itself, will have a higher value.

Domain Age

The last thing I will mention is that Search Engines factor in the age of domains, which means you have to be around for a while, and patient. While we are on the topic, you should know that the GoogleBot loves to see fresh content as well, which is why blogs are so effective.

Bottom Line

My advice is to first and foremost create compelling and valuable articles on your blog, and have remarkable products. Then, make it easy for users to link to your site by using services such as addthis and Facebook Like on your pages.

Blog Article Navigation

Want to beef up your Shopify article page a little? How about offering some basic navigation? I'm going to share a couple of tips on how to allow users to go back to the article listing page, as well as link to the next and previous articles in the blog.

First off, let's look at adding a link back to the blog listing page. Open up article.liquid in the Theme > Template Editor page in Admin, and add the following at the bottom of the page.

<a href="{{ blog.url }}">Back to {{ blog.title | escape }} articles</a>

Easy huh?

Next up, let's add links to the next and previous articles. 

Update: 8 days after publishing this article Shopify announced support for blog.next_article and blog.previous_article. The code below is no longer needed.

To do this we need to loop over the all the articles, using a variable to keep track of what the next and last articles were. Here is the code:

{% assign current_found = false %}
{% assign done = false %}
{% for a in blog.articles %}
	{% if current_found and done == false %}
		{% assign next_article = a %}
		{% assign done = true %}
	{% endif %}
	{% unless done %}
		{% if a.id == article.id %}
			{% assign current_found = true %}
		{% else %}
			{% assign prev_article = a %}
		{% endif %}
	{% endunless %}
{% endfor %}

You will now have access to two variables: next_article and prev_article. To use these add some code like this:

{% if prev_article %}
	<a href="{{ prev_article.url }}">Previous: {{ prev_article.title | escape }}</a>
{% endif %}

{% if next_article %}
	<a href="{{ next_article.url }}">Next: {{ next_article.title | escape }}</a>
{% endif %}

That's it. Two simple things to make browsing articles a little easier for your users.

Introducing our Help Desk

We have some great news for our Searchify and Vanity Theme customers - we now have a Help Desk to serve you better. The Help Desk will become our main avenue for supporting our premium Shopify themes, applications and other upcoming products. Additionally, we will create forums for users to share tips, ask questions and provide feedback. 

Check it out:

• Help Desk home page
• Vanity Theme forum
• Seachify forum