FAQ: SEO Capabilities of Essent SiteBuilder

You want to be able to seamlessly do business between your back office Business Management System or ERP and your front office ecommerce website, web portal, or company store. And you want to do it in a way that’s sensitive to Search Engine Optimization.

Essent SiteBuilder is a web Content Management System with SEO fundamentals baked in so that managing Ecommerce SEO is just a matter of managing your back office.

Here are frequently asked questions about Essent SiteBuilder™ when it comes to SEO and Ecommerce SEO.

I have an existing informational website. Can I continue to use it in conjunction with Essent SiteBuilder?

Yes. SiteBuilder can serve as the platform for part of a website or all of it. An example is a business that has a legacy informational website but wants to add an ecommerce portion like a company store. SiteBuilder can serve as the platform for just the company store, which can be either a subdomain or a separate domain.

How do I best preserve my current website’s search ranking when I move to SiteBuilder?

Web Structure Analysis by Essent will analyze URL structures, Site Mapping, linking, and more to identify a strategy that allows the new website to enjoy the SEO benefits of the legacy portion. From the analysis, a Website Migration Plan can be developed.

What is a Website Migration Plan and is it important?

A Website Migration Plan is the important roadmap for creating a new website while preserving the SEO credit of an existing website. When moving to SiteBuilder, Essent will perform a Migration Analysis that includes crawling the existing website to see what it looks like to search engines and creating a map to cut the site over to SiteBuilder. Essent will preserve your investment in the legacy site by carrying its SEO credit over to the new site.

Can I use SiteBuilder to create a website from scratch, and what are the SEO implications?

Yes, you can use SiteBuilder to build a website from scratch. Essent Web Structure Analysis will generate a strategy to make URL structure, Site Mapping, linking and other factors Search Engine Optimized right from the get-go.

Who designs the website?

That’s up to the customer. The customer can design the website, have Essent design it, or choose a template site. Essent can be involved in the design process as much or as little as the customer wants. Either way, SEO remains baked into the SiteBuilder infrastructure.

How do I manage and maintain the site?

Maintenance is simple after the initial design. Products are managed in the back office business management system and automatically published to the website. So you can add or change products, their price, their configurations, their availability, promotion codes, and any number of other factors without having to re-enter the website Content Management System. You manage and maintain the website by managing and maintaining your back office.

How do I create ecommerce product pages?

The system automatically generates product pages as you manage your back office. When you add a product in the back office, the system automatically generates a Search Engine Optimized product page on the website with a unique URL.

What makes the ecommerce product pages SEO-friendly?

A product page generated by SiteBuilder comes with built-in cues that help search engines understand what the page is and where it fits in the context of your website. Product titles and descriptions are just the start. The system also uses schema markup as well as settings for canonical tags and cardinality to communicate to search engines.

How does schema markup help SEO?

Schema markup helps search engines understand content on a webpage, even it it’s not text. For example, schema can tell a search engine the name of a video and its description, which in a sense makes the video readable. For a product, it can say which text is the product title, which is the description, and so on so that the search engine knows not only what the text is but what it means. SiteBuilder automatically uploads schema markup for product, images, and videos.

How do canonical tags and cardinality help SEO?

An ecommerce website typically features dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of nearly identical product pages. Without careful website structure, it’s easy for search engines to mistake these for duplicate pages and enforce an SEO penalty. It's normal to repeat content for the convenience of the reader, which conversely is inconvenient for search engines because it takes extra time to process the information -- and can be mistaken for as a technique to try to scam search engines.

Canonical tags and cardinality tell which pages are unique and which repeat duplicate content that is unique on a referenced page. Think of a blog. The blog itself is an individual page or website, and each blog post is an iteration of that individual page or site. Canonical tags and cardinality are the way to tell search engines that these similar pages aren’t really duplicate pages and shouldn’t be penalized.

Does SiteBuilder accommodate blogging?

SiteBuilder accommodates blogging and also uses a blog navigation system that allows you to infuse blog content throughout your website – a blog about the virtues of Item A can appear not just on the blog but also automatically as a link on the product page where you’re selling Item A.

How does blogging help SEO?

The blog content provides the search engine extra clues about what your website is and does. The blog link on the Item A product page, for example, is an extra indicator for search engines to show this page to people searching for Item A. Additionally, individual blog posts that rank well for certain keywords provide new gateways into your site. Blogs help you rank on new keywords to reach people who otherwise wouldn’t find your site.