Endeca Empowering SEO

Endeca Empowering SEO

You may have heard that the powerful Endeca SEO tools, which were previously licensed separately, are now included in the core Oracle Endeca offering – namely the SEO URL Optimization API and the SEO Sitemap Generator. If you’re an Endeca or Oracle Commerce customer with version 10.1 or higher, the URL Optimization API is actually pre-integrated and leveraged by the Assembler framework, so configuring it to work is as easy as modifying a few XML files. Likewise, the Sitemap Generator requires minimal configuration and integration to start pushing your full, dynamic sitemaps to Google for indexing. Too many details? Let me stop there before I get too technical, which is not my intent in this post. Instead, let me talk about what these tools do (and do well), what they don’t do and where the SEO/SEM strategy takes over.

SEO URL Optimization

This feature replaces your static site URLs and query string parameters with a more SEO-friendly dynamic path that can include one or more active navigation categories and facet refinements to add SEO relevance based on the URL contents. An example of this can be seen below, where the otherwise numerical category IDs have been supplemented with the actual category and sub-category names (Kitchen > Countertops and Backsplashes):

http://www.homedepot.com/b/kitchen-countertops-backsplashes/N-5yc1vZbmf2

The same can be done with facets, like brand refinements (in this case, Kohler, under the Kitchen Sinks sub-category):

 http://www.homedepot.com/b/kitchen-kitchen-sinks/kohler/N-5yc1vZarsaZ1qh

By applying these dynamically, the URL Optimization significantly improves page rankings over non-optimized URLs, which forces page rank to be based solely on page content.

Sitemap Generator

In addition to the optimized URL format, the Sitemap Generator tool leverages the full product catalog that’s been indexed in order to produce a complete list of all category, refinement, and detail page URLs a website visitor may end up on by using Endeca’s Guided Navigation. This ensures that more obscure products or pages are reached by the search engine spiders and accounted for. An example of the Sitemap Generator output can be seen below:

          <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>

          <urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9“>

               <url>

                     <loc>http://www.homedepot.com/b/kitchen-kitchen-sinks/N-5yc1vZarsa</loc>

                     <lastmod>2014-03-26</lastmod>

               </url>

               <url>

                     <loc>http://www.homedepot.com/b/kitchen-kitchen-sinks/kohler/N-5yc1vZarsaZ1qh</loc>

                     <lastmod>2014-03-24</lastmod>

               </url>

The sitemap can include all category browses, product details, search results, and static page URLs if desired (and configured) – all ensuring maximum exposure for external search queries.  Now, you might say, “This is great! I really don’t need to do anything else?”

Well, not so fast.

SEO/SEM Best Practices

By using the tools above, you will only get halfway to the finish line. Other SEO and SEM best practices are needed, such as employing a sound content strategy, canonical link tags on pages with no-index and no-follow tags for some navigation links (specifically those that do not materially alter the page contents). All together, these things work to significantly improve your site rankings, as well as product findability for long-tail searches on Google and other search engines.

Let Us Help

If you haven’t worked with the URL Optimization tool before, need help to run the Sitemap Generator tool or wonder what the best ways to get it submitted to Google are Drop us a line and one of our consultants would be happy to help you. After all, that’s why we’re here. Additionally,  employing a powerful SEM strategy and taking you beyond relying on natural search results is something our Performance Marketing team can assist you with.

Some people say it’s magic, but we like to say it’s just good business.