Salesforce B2C Commerce 24.7 > Merchandising Your Site > Search Engine Optimization > Evaluate Your SEO Implementation > SEO Best Practices

Sample Extensions to SEO

Check out these sample exentions for SEO.

Home Page Link in Sitemap

The Salesforce B2C Commerce storefront generated map contains a link to the homepage of your store in the following format:

http://<alias>/on/demandware/Sites-<Sitename>-Site/default/Home-Show.

However, if you configure a domain alias for your site that resolves to your home page, using a rule similar to:

"www.mysite.com" : [
{"pipeline":"Home-Show"} 
],

Then the generated sitemap contains a link similar to:

http://www.mysite.com/

Note: Configure sitemap settings individually for each instance type. You can't replicate sitemap site preferences between Staging and Production or Development. Create the settings and job to generate the sitemap on each instance.

Customize the Default URL Using the UpdatePageMeta Pipelet

This extension describes how to remove the product description from the end of the search-friendly URL, by creating a pipelet that is called before the UpdatePageMetaData pipelet that changes the inputs that are used for the UpdatePageMetaData pipelet.

This is a way to dynamically generate these values, without having to manually input them.

Create External URL Redirects

B2C Commerce's site alias configuration doesn't allow for external URL redirects. The solution is to build a custom pipeline that sends the configured hostname to the redirectpermanent template. This extension shows how to build such a custom pipeline.

To specify the main deferred hostname, define an attribute called HTTPhostname that is managed in Business Manager. This specifies at a site level what the main HTTP and HTTPS hostname is.

Configure HTTP and HTTPS host name in B2C Commerce.
In the Your Shop Here site lookup SEO settings. The default SEO pattern generates links with the host name. However, to restrict the customer to view the preferred host name, you must specify the host name here. This forces this host name to appear the next time the customer clicks a site link.
Create a custom pipeline RedirectAlias-Start.
Create a Start node.
Create an Assign node.
Add the following value to the From 0 property:
http:// + dw.system.Site.current.httpHostName
Create an interaction node with the current/redirect template from the SiteGenesis application. This is a redirect permanent template.
Set up the wrong site alias to call RedirectAlias-Start.

Cache Permanent Redirects

The redirectpermanent template is not cached in SiteGenesis. If you don't cache it, the requests coming in go to the application server, which isn't good for the domain. This extension includes an iscache in the template, so that the template is cached.

Retrieve and Store Page Rankings

The simplest way to check that store page rankings is to type in your site name in the search engine you are interested in and then count the sites from the top of the page.

Submit Sitemaps to Yahoo and MSN

In addition to submitting your site map to Google, you can also submit site maps to Yahoo and other search engines.