Built-In Advanced Search Engine Optimization
No SEO, No Business
Why do most Web businesses fail? Not for lack of a brilliant idea, or because the marketplace is too crowded, or because they rendered their logo in purple instead of green. They fail because they have no strategy for attracting natural search engine visitors.
The simple fact is this: if you don’t appear in the search engine listings, you will be losing customers.
Sprout Commerce helps you get in the game and stay in the game. It makes Internet success much easier to achieve because it’s focused intensely on search engine optimization—the right words in the right sequence, the best positioning of elements on a page. It’s the best way to assure a steady stream of customers, and it’s offered at an affordable price.
“Sprout Commerce combines SEO know-how with award-winning e-commerce software. It’s integrated into the bones of your website automatically, so you can build a site that is optimized for search engines without having to learn the mechanics of SEO.”
No Substitute for Experience
In the decade since we began doing business online, we’ve learned what does not work and, in that way, we eventually came to what does work. Trial-and-error has led us to understand how search engine spiders crawl around a website.
Basically, the job of a spider is to find as much relevant information as it can as quickly as possible. Your job is to help it decide what is most important. And you do that by structuring your site—from a code standpoint—in a spider-friendly way.
That’s what will get you to the top of the “results” page.
Content Comes First—Literally
A site that is built to be optimized for search engines allows them to spend more time indexing content rather than code. With Sprout Commerce templates structuring your content, the text that is unique to each page and product is presented to the search engines first—before any navigation interferes. This way, the search engine doesn’t need to deal with unnecessary information.
Additionally, each page is created as static—rather than dynamic—HTML. Because search engine spiders read all the content on a static page, you avoid the twin dangers of any page in your site being overlooked, or of spiders getting caught in an endless loop of streaming content.
Another way Sprout Commerce makes your site spider-friendly is with Cascading Style Sheets. They reduce the number of HTML tags, and that keeps your site “code light.”
Lots of Content = Lots of Visitors
You want to clue search engines to the phrases and keywords that are focused on in your site because this goes a long way in helping them find, index and rank pages for relevancy. Our templates make it easy by prompting you to put blocks of keyword-friendly content in strategic places, including adding text to images with ALT tags.
Sprout Commerce also allows you to create META description tags automatically. Though these are visible only to spiders, they allow you to boost the keyword content of your site.
Prioritize Your Content
No one doing a natural keyword search is looking for your privacy policy or your “about us” information. Sprout Commerce lets you tell a spider to ignore those links by inserting “no follow” tags in strategic places.
There’s another reason for no follow tags: If you don’t have them, you can end up diluting your ranking on the pages that make you money.
Search engines give a lot of weight to H1 tags, and Sprout Commerce lets you create them automatically. H1 tags not only prioritize content, they also further enrich a page with keywords and phrases.
Geographic Searches Niche
One more thing: Sprout Commerce automatically publishes your geographical information on every page, which guarantees that anyone conducting a location-based search will find you.
Cooperating with Google
Once your site is up—and whenever you add new products or pages—a built-in utility creates a Google site map. This utility also publishes your product information to Google Base. Both speed up the process by which Google finds your site and increase your chances of appearing on the results page.
We understand SEO, so you don’t have to
If any of this sounds like a foreign language to you, don’t worry. All you need is to be an expert in your business (so you can provide useful content) and knowledgeable about your industry (so you can provide potential links for your site). We do all the rest.
And with our access to the Stompernet community of certified SEO experts—Leslie Rhode, Dan Thies, Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon, to name-drop a few—we’re constantly on the cutting edge of new technology. That gives us an understanding of how to keep improving, and it gives you an SEO expert working essentially for free.
The Best of Both Worlds
We have nothing against website designers. They work hard, and they usually come up with a nice-looking product. The problem is, without an understanding of SEO and the ability to apply the techniques that make it work, those sites will be structurally fragile. And a structurally fragile site won’t bring you any business.
Sprout Commerce, on the other hand, helps you build a site that is both well-designed and optimized for search engines. And because of that you’ll make more money.
“Sprout Commerce offers the winning formula for success on the Web”