SEO Updates in ProductCart v5.4

ProductCart has always incorporated SEO best practices within its design and has done core code updates over the years to give our merchant clients cutting edge advantages over their competition.

What’s New in ProductCart v5.4 SEO?

Although it’s not a long list, version 5.4 of ProductCart brings these two major changes:

JSON-LD Introduced
Product Canonical URLs Set Across Categories

Let’s dig a little deeper to explain how these SEO updates benefit your ProductCart store.

JSON-LD for Structured Data

There’s a reason why “Structured Data” or schema markup have been SEO buzz terms for many years. Since 2011, all major search engines have adopted schema markup, as it allows them to understand and organize webpage content more quickly than without it. As a result, having schema markup included in your web design qualifies your products and content for appearing in Google’s coveted “Rich Snippets.” Additionally, you’ll place higher in Google, Bing, and Yahoo due to their algorithms being focused on browsing structured data as it’s more machine readable. Using structured data works because it simply feeds search engines the information they are looking for, in the best format possible.

That’s where JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) is helpful. It’s a simple scripting language that’s light weight and excels at reading and writing structed data on the web. In addition, JSON-LD enables data to be linked between websites, which helps get your content discovered in relevant searches. JSON-LD also contains meta data (descriptive information about the webpage content) which makes it easier for search engines to sort and match your products and content to relevant user searches.

Fixed Product Canonical URLs

The main benefit of this feature for your ProductCart store is that it assists in indexing and better ranking each product page in search results. When a webpage is duplicated with different URLs, it can be confusing for search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo to know the correct webpage URL to index. A canonical URL is simply the preferred URL that is set (by search engines or the webmaster) to be indexed on search engines. The great thing about ProductCart is that it makes setting canonical URLs a breeze, by automatically defining and setting the canonical URL for every product page. Additionally, the canonical URL for each product page is used by default, even when a product shows in more than one category. This greatly reduces conflicts and confusion when search engines are trying to make sense of your website structure. It also ensures that search engines will display the intended webpage for each product. If a preferred canonical URL is not set, then it’s left to the search engine to choose which version of your webpage is best for indexing. Consequently, the webpage chosen to be displayed in search results may not be the most optimal.

Other SEO Features in ProductCart

If you like to see a list of other features and options you can adjust to optimize your ProductCart store SEO, check out these articles: