Salesforce B2C Commerce 24.7 > Merchandising Your Site

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) focuses on increasing non-paid search engine results for your site. Utilizing both creative and technical elements, you can improve search engine ranking and awareness, with the goal of driving more traffic to your site. External search engines (for example, Google) assign lower ranking to lengthy URLs with non-relevant keywords, multiple directory layers, and parameters.

We recommend viewing the SEO Workflows within Commerce Clouddiagram, and the SEO Platform Adoption Playbook.

There are several tasks before and after you create your sitemap that must be done to optimize your site for the organic (unpaid) results of external search engines.

Site Design Checklist

Task	Role
Include a keyword-rich, HTML sitemap for use by both website visitors and robots. See the Commerce Cloud Keyword Mapping Worksheet for additional information.	Developer
Don't require the use of cookies to browse catalog pages.	Developer
Design pages to reference content assets that are managed in Business Manager, so that changes don't require changes to site templates or code.	Developer
Optimize page design to avoid "code bloat". See Site Performance for more information.	Developer
Design storefront-specific "404" error pages containing alternative paths into the site or product catalogs if users browse to outdated URLs. See the URL Redirects topic.	Developer

Site Configuration Checklist

The first four tasks described in the checklist must be performed in the order described for the remaining steps to work correctly.

Task	Role
Set up and register all DNS and domain names.	Developer
Use UX Studio to add the SiteMap pipeline to your application cartridge	Developer
Create short, meaningful URLs for external search engines to index by assigning a short alias to a long hostname. See Assigning a Hostname Alias.	Developer
Use the Business Manager URL Rules module to change the URLs for your site and add information that can improve your search rank. See Configuring SEO URLs.	Developer
Create custom default URLs, page-specific URLs, and page meta-tags. (optional) See Configuring SEO URLs.	Developer
Configure your site to use your content delivery network (CDN) with Salesforce B2C Commerce to deliver static content and dynamic imaging service (DIS) content to your customers. See Configuring an External CDN.	Developer
Configure meta tags.	Developer
Create keyword-rich body text, intra-site links, anchor text, and image <alt> tags.	Developer
Remove duplicate content in your site. For example, remove two URLs for the same page content.	Developer
Use static mapping or dynamic mapping rules to map legacy URLs. For more information, see the URL Redirects topic.	Developer
Identify inbound links on other sites and ask them to update with new URLs.	Developer

Deployment Checklist

You must have completed all of the tasks in the site configuration checklist before starting the deployment checklist.

Task	Role
Map legacy URLs	Merchant
Identify inbound links on other sites and ask them to update with new URLs.	Merchant
Configure "301" HTTP redirects from legacy URLs.	Merchant
Use Business Manager to create sitemaps for external search engines to improve freshness and completeness of data indexed by search engines. See Generating Sitemaps	Merchant
Register your site and submit sitemaps to external search engines, such as Google. See Notifying Google About Your Sitemap.	Developer
Use an external tool to build a robots.txt file to exclude portions of your site from indexing. Add a robots.txt file to control portions of the site you don't want search engines to index. Robots.txt can include non-html resources that could cause problems with indexing. See Generating a Robots.txt File.	Developer
Use Business Manager to create and manage page meta tags (using B2C Commerce Script APIs) for your storefront product and content details and list pages.	Developer
Validate HTML code to ensure that there are no errors that prevent spiders from indexing the site.	Developer

Maintenance

After deployment, you must regularly undertake the following tasks.

Task	Role
Use Business Manager to add titles, descriptions, keywords, and sitemap attributes for new categories and products.	Merchant
Use Business Manager to run the sitemap job to create updated versions of the sitemap.	Merchant
Make directory listing submissions	Merchant
Use Analytics and B2C Commerce reports to analyze site traffic and tune keywords and sitemap attributes.	Merchant
Use the URL redirects feature to create permanent 301 redirects for obsolete B2C Commerce URLs to new B2C Commerce URLs. See the URL Redirects.	Merchant