The internet has caused a disruptive shift to many careers and industries. Although some companies have suffered or even had to close, new fortunes have also been made in the digital frontier. If you aspire to join the ranks of those finding internet success, look for the easiest way to build a business online. Some internet entrepreneurs do it the hard way by writing their own code. Others use an existing platform to build product pages with popular tools built-in. Choosing the latter enables them to better focus on their customers.

There are many choices available for building your online product pages. The current leader among website or blog Content Management Systems (CMS) is WordPress. And within the WordPress universe, the dominant eCommerce plugin, a tool for enabling the listing and selling of products, is Woocommerce.

You work hard to build your business. Make sure your online efforts pay off by optimizing for search. Good search engine optimization (SEO) will help customers find the product they want quickly. Provide a direct path to conversion, with few obstacles. Here’s how to maximize SEO for your product pages using Woocommerce.

Introduction to Woocommerce

Woocommerce is a free plugin for WordPress. It is well documented and has strong community support. WooCommerce now powers 30% of all online stores. This flexible, free plugin makes it easy to:

• Manage your product descriptions and categories
• Track your inventory
• Offer affiliate tracking so you can incentivize your fans and community
• Create multiple payment options and shipping rules

In other words, as Woocommerce puts it, with this tool installed on your eCommerce site you can, “Sell anything and sell it beautifully!”

Optimizing SEO in Woocommerce

When you add Woocommerce, make sure to maximize your search traffic. Viral Wolf recommends Yoast. If Woocommerce is the dominant force among plugins for eCommerce, Yoast is the dominant plugin for general SEO. Just adding the basic functions of Yoast exponentially improves your search results. Also, Yoast offers a special plugin that combines the features of both tools, resulting in the best results from both Yoast and Woocommerce.

Some online businesses sometimes pay attention to SEO just once in a while. They may take an hour here and there, tweaking an occasional description. However, most of your competitors are doing a lot more than this.

Far better is to design search engine friendly product content. Make good SEO practices the foundation of your site and you’ll see the best results over time.

Quality, Meaningful Content

“Provide useful, high-quality, and unique content.” This is the first of Google’s rules for good content, which guide developers on how to improve their search results. Write good, meaningful copy. Google’s algorithm is merely trying to make sense out of your content. Clear descriptions do a lot more than fancy tricks and schemes.

Categories, Tags, and Attributes

Carefully considering how you organize your line of products is the next step. This is how your customers can find the options they want on your site. There are many fields to hold this metadata. Meta means that the data or information exists alongside your main content in order to categorize everything correctly. Tags help sort and list all the content on your site. It also helps Google see your site as a place where those tagged items can be more easily discovered.

Don’t Overlook Images

High-quality, optimized, tagged and well-named images are extremely important for SEO. A great deal of searching is done by image today. Your customer might not know what the item is called, but when they recognize it in a lineup of other similar items, they will click your picture and head to your site. Always set a meaningful ALT attribute for each image. A simple rule of thumb, if you make it easy for a blind person to find your product by writing clear ALT descriptions, Google will find it too and reward you for that extra effort.

Build Mobile-Friendly

There are many other technical considerations for improving user experience on your product pages. To name just one, you may already know that Google greatly prefers sites that are mobile-friendly. Any review of site analytics will reveal that most people are reading your site on mobile devices. A mobile-first strategy will make sure your content looks good and works well on phones and tablets.

There is a lot of technical sculpting that you can do, but don’t get overwhelmed. Remember, the first, most important thing is to start by caring about quality content and establishing a standard of good SEO practices across your whole site. Then, as you gain more understanding, you can go deeper to get an edge on your competition.