Tag: SEO

Posted on in B2B e-commerce, SEO

What Is a SERP? How Search Engine Results Pages Work

Learn how search engine results pages rank content, and discover tips for optimizing your site’s search performance.

The internet is a well of content, and search engines help ensure the best content rises to the top. Few people go past the first page of search engine results, and most search traffic goes to sites that rank on the top half of the page. To attract viewers to your website, you’ll need to secure a top spot, and to do that, it’s helpful to understand the anatomy of a search engine results page (SERP). 

What is a search engine results page (SERP)?

When someone enters a query into a search engine, the list of results appears on a search engine results page, or SERP. Brands and content creators use search engine optimization (SEO) to improve their content and increase the likelihood of ranking at the top of SERPs. In addition to link results, search engines continue to add new features to SERPS, including elements like information-rich panels and paid ads. Depending on the search term, result pages may include links, videos, products, and other featured snippets. 

Elements of a SERP

Search engines aim to deliver relevant, informative content to web users. To do this, they include a variety of search features that display different types of media. The following are all common types of results you may find displayed on a SERP:

Ads

Paid results appear at the top of SERPs. For example, Google ads show up at the top with a bolded Sponsored tag to distinguish them from organic listings.  Other search engines, such as Bing, may use an Ad tag or display paid results in a box. For competitive keywords, ads sometimes make up as many as the top four results on the page. Additional ads may be displayed at the bottom of the page and can also appear in the map stack. 

Common queries

Google search results display questions related to user queries in the “People also ask” section. Google pulls text from relevant articles, and users can read summary answers without leaving the search results page. 

Related videos

Search engines return video results along with links. Videos are more likely to appear in search results if they are embedded on a web page and include keywords in the video title. 

Shopping results

For queries related to consumer goods, search engines often display shopping ads at the top of the page. These paid search results include a product image, its price, and the retailer’s name. Clicking a shopping ad takes the user directly to a purchase page. 

Organic results

Organic search results can include links, videos, or images. This content made it to the SERP based on strong page authority, proper keyword usage, and positive user response. 

Rich snippets

Some search engine results pages add a rich snippet, which is excerpted information that might be drawn from a source such as Wikipedia. This common SERP feature provides the user with additional context before they click on the link. Rich snippets also often highlight how-to content, recipes, and reviews. 

Image results

The collection of images that appears on a SERP is known as an image pack. Search algorithms use image alt text—a written description of the image indexed by search engines and read aloud by screen readers for the visually impaired—as well as image file names to identify relevant images. 

Knowledge graphs

A knowledge panel is a Google SERP feature that displays infographics, charts, or other visual data alongside standard search results. 

Map results

Search engines return map results for queries related to physical locations. Searches for local services may also return a specialized map of businesses based on the user’s location—these results are also known as a local pack. 

News results

For queries related to current events, search engines like Google and Bing curate a “Top stories” section that highlights articles from major news outlets. These results appear on the primary results page and are separate from the Google News tab at the top of the page. Searching for trending topics may also return social media results highlighting popular posts. 

What are the key factors that determine ranking on a SERP?

Several ranking factors can help you create web pages that perform well on SERPS. These factors are central to search engine optimization (SEO), the practice of tailoring web content to suit a search engine’s expectations. To optimize effectively, it’s important to understand the ranking factors search engines evaluate when ordering search results. 

Page authority

Page authority is one of the primary ranking signals affecting search placement. Search engines use advanced mathematical formulas known as algorithms to generate an authority score to measure the overall quality and trustworthiness of a webpage. Factors like page loading speed, content quality, and reader behavior all affect a page’s authority score. 

Backlinks

Backlinks—links from external pages that direct users to your website—help build page authority. Google believes high-quality backlinks from established, trustworthy websites are a positive indicator of content quality. 

Page speed

Search engines aim to create a positive experience for web users. Websites with a slow load time are considered poor quality and may receive a lower search ranking. 

Content type

Web pages that include multiple types of content are more visible to search engines. Adding images or videos to text-based pages can increase their perceived value. 

Bounce rate

A website’s bounce rate refers to the percentage of users that leave the page right after clicking onto it. A high bounce rate is an indication that readers are not satisfied with the content, which may lead to lower SERP placement. Web users may bounce from a page if the content is poorly written, doesn’t align with their expectations, or is blocked by pop-up ads. 

5 ways to optimize your website to rank on the SERP

Increase your chances of ranking by optimizing both the content and the technical performance of your website. Addressing the following five elements can help climb search position:

1. Research keywords

Conduct research to understand user intent associated with your target keywords. To rank for multiple terms, use a keyword research tool such as Semrush or Google’s Keyword Planner to identify related searches to target in addition to your primary keywords. Focus on finding keywords with a high search volume.

2. Practice on-page SEO

On-page copy, meta descriptions, title tags, and image tags are all elements of on-page SEO. Incorporating your keywords in an organic way will help make your web content visible to search engines. Optimizing images by including accurate alt text and writing descriptive file names also increases their chance of appearing in Google image search results.

3. Create a good user experience

Decrease your bounce rate by creating informative content and displaying it in an easy-to-read format. Prioritize reader experience over heavy keyword usage.

4. Consider search intent

Google’s algorithm classifies search queries as navigational, informational, or transactional. If a user enters an informational query, such as “Who was the 15th president of Guatemala?” they may have a negative experience if they end up on a product page. Optimize your content for search intent by writing accurate titles and creating content that aligns with the intent behind your target keywords. 

5. Implement data markup

Using a schema tool or app to incorporate structured data markup tells search engines what type of content you’re promoting. Proper schema markup increases your chances of being featured in a rich snippet—a quick summary of information that appears directly on the SERP. You can use markup tools to classify content by type: popular types include recipes, events, how-tos, and articles. 

Nickaila Daley, content SEO specialist at Shopify, says the best way to top the SERP is to prioritize creating high quality content. “Search engines aim to provide the best search results for its users,” Nickaila says. “Ensuring your content is informative, engaging, and aligns with users search intent is important. This includes optimizing product pages, blog posts, and landing pages with relevant keywords and valuable information.”

Wrapping Up:

We at ShopShipShake have been working with businesses like yours with fulfilling experiences. We offer one-stop services, including an efficient supply chain, over 10 thousand of China’s suppliers, over 1,000,000 SKU and more. With a successful track record of over 100,000 clients, we are sure to deliver your orders requirements.

Let’s get in touch to build, sustain, and grow your businesses! If you would like to know more details about us, please contact us:  blog.shopshipshake.com. If you are interested in cooperating with us. Please register on: https://shop.shopshipshake.com/shop/register/business

The article originates from: https://www.shopify.com/za/blog/serp

Posted on in Business, BUSINESS, SEO

How To Create a Sitemap in 4 Simple Steps in 2024

Before you create a sitemap manually, check to see if your tech stack has already created one for you. If not, you can create a sitemap in four easy steps.

If you knew inspectors were coming to approve a building for commercial use, you’d probably set things up for them beforehand, get an idea of what they wanted to check, and be on-site to walk them through the premises. That’s pretty much what a sitemap does, but for search engine crawlers. It provides them with a layout of the website, a hierarchy of each page’s importance, and a rough time frame for when they should come back around again to inspect for updated keywords. 

Creating a sitemap for SEO is fairly straightforward. Although it can be time-consuming for larger sites, a suite of tools can help streamline the process or even automate it. It’s also just good practice, given the importance of a website in the user’s overall experience of a business. Just as preparing a property for inspectors provides a good opportunity to tidy up and ensure essential infrastructure is in working order, so too can the process of creating a sitemap provide a good overview of your website’s overall structure and coherence. 

What is a sitemap? 

A sitemap is a file that provides a structured list of all a website’s pages, helping search engines like Google understand the site’s organization and content hierarchy. This enhances the site’s discoverability in search results. The file contains a list of every URL you want crawled and ranked, as well as their relative importance to each other, their last update, and their frequency of update. For ecommerce sites, sitemaps guide search engine bots through product or service listings, categories, and relevant pages. 

There are two types of sitemaps: one written in XML (extensible markup language) and the other written in HTML (hypertext markup language). XML sitemaps are created so search engines can crawl and index your site. Specialized sitemap formats exist for websites primarily focused on presenting imagery and video, and “news sitemaps” help websites like Google News and Google Discovery prioritize surfacing timely news stories. 

What-is-XML

HTML sitemaps help with crawlability, helping search engine bots move from one page to another. HTML sitemaps help bots discover more pages.

Why create a sitemap?

The benefit of creating a sitemap is that it helps search engine bots crawl more pages on a regular basis, which can improve your website’s rankings, as rankings are linked to on-page optimization. Google uses sitemaps to help its bots better crawl and index sites. Arthur Camberlein, technical SEO and data specialist at Shopify, says, “Remember to list all the website URLs you want to index. Don’t include pages like ‘/cart’ or ‘/contact’, for example. [And] take the time to create an XML sitemap, because it helps bots efficiently crawl your pages.” 

Sitemaps can help you: 

  • Index new pages quickly. If your site frequently adds or updates products, a sitemap helps search engines quickly identify these changes, leading to faster exposure.
  • Enhance user experience (UX). UX designers also produce sitemaps so they can create a website layout that’s intuitive and easy for users to navigate.
  • Prevent duplicate content issues. Avoid including non-canonical URLs in your sitemaps. Doing so may prompt bots to crawl these URLs, which wouldn’t benefit your website. Your website’s XML and HTML sitemaps should only contain self-canonicalized URLs that are indexed (as opposed to not indexed) and return a “200 HTTP” status code.
  • Appeal internationally. If your ecommerce business operates in multiple regions and languages, you can create separate sitemaps for each locale, so search engines use the appropriate versions in each location. 

How to create a sitemap

Before creating a sitemap, decide whether you want to automate the process. One or multiple elements of your tech stack may have already created a sitemap for you. For example: 

  • Shopify dynamically creates a sitemap for all websites built on its platform, including international variants.
  • The popular web publishing tool WordPress allows users to take advantage of plug-ins that generate sitemaps automatically.
  • Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, and Link Sleuth have tools that can help generate an automated sitemap for your website. 

If you’ve used any of these, you can skip directly to step four to learn how to submit a sitemap to the search engines of your choice. If you want to make one manually, though, the process is fairly straightforward. 

1. Gather all your URLs 

The first step is to get all of your website’s URLs together in one place. If you have a very small website, you can do this by clicking on each page and pasting the URLs into a text document. For larger websites, consider using site crawlers (like Screaming Frog or Site Bulb), exporting the list of URLs from your content management system (CMS), or pulling them from the landing page data of your analytics platform. 

2. Code them in XML 

Next, add the data that enriches this list of URLs for crawlers. Using a text editor like Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit (Mac), or a code editor like Sublime Text, begin creating the XML code for the sitemap. For each web page, you’ll list its: 

  • Location. This is just its URL.
  • Last modified date. This is written in the format YYYY-MM-DD.
  • Change frequency. You can list its update frequency as always (for constantly updated pages), hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or never (if the page is likely to remain static). 
  • Priority. This ranges from 0.0 (least important) to 1.0 (most important). You typically want your homepage listed as 1.0, major pages at around 0.8, and lower-importance blog posts at around 0.6. 

Do this for every page, then save the file as sitemap.xml. 

3. Add your sitemap to your website

The next step is to take your sitemap and attach it to your website. Locate the root folder of your website and upload the sitemap file. Now that the sitemap is online and accessible via browser, capture its URL for the next step.

4. Submit your sitemap to search engines

Finally, you need to let search engines know you’ve done the work. (Even if you automated the creation of their sitemap with a tool, you’ll still have to take this step.) Go to Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools, find the tab listed “sitemap,” and paste the sitemap URL you just created. At this point, you’ve given the engines all the instructions they need, and if there are any glitches with the information you provided, they’ll surface them for you. 

Sitemap best practices

Consider following these tips when building and maintaining your sitemap:

  • Use tools. Your CMS, website builder, or analytics program may have tools to help streamline or automate the process of building a sitemap. Unless you’re really interested in getting to know XML and your full site hierarchy, make use of them. 
    • Use sitemap indexes for large websites. If you have more than 50,000 URLs to index, build multiple sitemaps nested together using a sitemap index. 
    • Prioritize high-quality pages. When categorizing each page’s priority, emphasize the key landing pages and category pages, so search engines know they’re more important than, say, a very old blog post. 
    • Consider which pages to block. Search engines cannot index pages that are password protected, so do not add those to your sitemap. 
    • Consider publishing an HTML sitemap for users. Many major websites have HTML sitemaps that delineates the hierarchy of the website and its pages. This doesn’t really help with search engine optimization (SEO), but it can be a useful tool for visitors looking to scope your full offerings in a different format. 
    • Validate your code.Code needs to be perfect to work properly. Before uploading a manually coded sitemap, use a code validation tool like W3C Markup Validation Service or TutorialsPoint’s XML Validation Tool. 
    • Update your sitemap periodically. Set yourself a reminder to upload a new sitemap occasionally. If you’re frequently adding lots of new pages, consider doing this every couple of weeks. If you’ve performed a dramatic redesign, update your sitemap quickly so the new pages are reflected in search engine results. Even if you have a relatively static page, consider giving it an annual once-over.

Wrapping Up:

We at ShopShipShake have been working with businesses like yours with fulfilling experiences. We offer one-stop services, including an efficient supply chain, over 10 thousand of China’s suppliers, over 1,000,000 SKU and more. With a successful track record of over 100,000 clients, we are sure to deliver your orders requirements.

Let’s get in touch to build, sustain, and grow your businesses! If you would like to know more details about us, please contact us:  blog.shopshipshake.com. If you are interested in cooperating with us. Please register on: https://shop.shopshipshake.com/register/business

This article originates from: https://www.shopify.com/za/blog/how-to-create-a-sitemap