What you need to do

Page Titles

Page titles are traditionally seen as the highest priority in SEO. It is what users see in their browser tab, and the main title shown in the Google results listing. A good title :

• is length restricted (about 58 characters, but this changes from year to year)

• has a catchy, clickable style

• has a unique wording, not formulaic

• has the main page keyword first, followed perhaps by another less important keyword

So, create a good, unique page title for all of your products, categories, pages and posts. Pakk doesn't produce page titles based on a 'formula' like other platforms do: put the work in and write them by hand - it will pay off in the future.

If you don't specify a page title manually, the system will simply fill in the name of the product or post title for you, so that it's never blank - but that's not a good long-term strategy.

Meta Description

Meta descriptions have also been traditionally important. In the past, it was considered that the keyword composition of your page descriptions was important, but nowadays it's generally thought that it's more important to write a description that is:

• length restricted (again, about 160 characters)

• human friendly, not robot friendly

• not stuffed with keywords, include your 2 main keywords at most

Again, we don't create meta descriptions automagically, so go ahead and write them by hand for your products. Just like with titles, the system will simply use the product description or post summary until you get round to writing a proper one.

Slugs

Slugs are the unique component of a URL that is specific to the product, category, post or page in question. For example https://me.pakk.store/product/27-inch-monitor is a URL for a product with the slug 27-inch-monitor. Slugs should be:

• unique (top priority, enforced by Pakk)

• short

• 'clean' (no wierd symbols, just lower case letters and hyphens)

Create good slugs for your products and pages by observing the above rules.

(Not) Meta Keywords

You might hear some of the old timers talking about "Meta Keywords". In the past, it was normal to provide a list of keywords in your page. But for a long time now, these are basically being ignored by search engines, at least by Google. It's not worth your time worrying about them, and we don't provide for including them

Content

In conversations about SEO, you'll often hear the word "content" thrown about. For online stores, like yours, content means well-written, useful and interesting articles that will draw readers to your site, keep them there and keep them coming back.

Pakk is not a blogging engine, but we include just enough 'blogging' tools for you to create content and, more importantly, deeply integrate it with your product catalogue.

So, you should concentrate on creating good, succinct posts that:

• are relatively succinct, 500 - 1000 words

• are not stuffed with keywords, but highlight 2-3 important words a few times

• have a great title, featuring 1 keyword

• have a proper title, slug and meta description (see above)

• link to other relevant articles on your site

• link to relevant products

Internal Linking

Internal linking are the links within your site that take a user from page to page. A well organised site should have a good amount of cross-links between internal material. There are quite a few ways you can promote good cross-linking in your Pakk store:

• create interesting content posts and link to those posts from product pages and...

• vice versa: link to products from post pages

• set up related item groups to promote cross-linking between groups of related products

• set up a logical, hierarchical and thorough category tree - this will result in both great navigation for your customers as well as a thorough link tree in the main navigation menu

• use your custom 'auxiliary' and 'footer' menus to link to particularly important pages

• use homepage blocks to link to important posts, pages or products

External Linking

A small amount of outbound links from your store can show search engines you are providing users with relevant and useful information. You can create outbound links in:

• homepage blocks

• auxiliary bar menu

• footer bar menu

• inside the content of posts and pages

Pakk also allows you to set up your social media 'handles' for sites like Twitter and Facebook and will automatically create outbound links to those sites for you.

Domain Redirects

Search engines prefer it if there is only one, canonical version of your site - not multiple duplicate versions under different domains (including subdomains - and yes, including the wwwsubdomain). Having said that, you might have several different domains pointed at a Pakk store, and you'll almost certainly have the www version and non-www version pointed at your store.

You should set up domain redirects for your store to point all 'alternative' domains to whatever you consider the 'canonical' domain to be.

It doesn't really matter whether you choose the www or non-www version as canonical, just pick one and redirect your alternative domains to it. At Pakk, we recommend using the non-wwwversion, we just think it looks cleaner.