SEO Backpack: The Ultimate OpenCart Solution for Higher Search Engine Ranking
Search engine optimization… it never ends, right?
Well, unfortunately it wasn’t meant to.
As user experience and behavior evolves, so will the technologies that provide and enhance them. A good search experience and accurate results will always be priority for Google and other search engines. We can only try to adapt to that.
For owners of E-Commerce businesses, chasing the top positions is a continuing challenge.
However, not giving up on your effort for SEO pays off. And it pays off well.
-
43% of traffic to E-Commerce sites comes from organic Google search and 26% of that traffic is generated by Google Adwords. (Source: Wolfgang digital)
It’s important to obtain as much of that traffic as possible. Ignore the numbers generated by Google Adwords for a second and let’s focus on the organic traffic.
Why?
-
70-80% of users ignore the paid ads on top and focus on the organic results. (Source: Search Engine Land)
Getting to those leading organic results requires a lot of consistency and relentless effort. Producing new content, getting more and more backlinks, it’s a very long list.
If only there was a way to fix all of that with a single click...
Well, there is one now. And it’s designed specifically for OpenCart.
We’re proud to introduce SEO Backpack!
The ultimate SEO solution for all users - those who aren’t familiar with optimization, as well as ones who like to dig deep into the configurations and want to reach the highest positions.
Let’s start with 3 simple steps for addressing SEO issues:
- Determine an issue
- Apply the fix
- Verify the results
Below, you are able to see how we organized SEO Backpack’s dashboard.
We created a homebuilt algorithm to identify your SEO score based on more than 20 factors (more about it below).
You are also able to see what needs to be fixed and what is already taken care of. Unlike other modules where you don’t know what is being fixed and what is not, here you can see the bigger picture.
We believe that transparency is important for an SEO tool.
That’s why the optimization steps the module performs are displayed in a notification like this one:
It shows the subjects that have been modified by SEO Backpack and the applied changes.
Click the Test again button to verify that the fixes have taken effect and the results are positive.
As you see, we’ve reached a 100% score and our test store has no more issues to resolve.
What does the score mean?
Your OpenCart store has a lot of aspects that are subject to optimization for search engines. URLs, Meta data (titles, descriptions, keywords), product image names, content in information pages, etc.
These are all part of the SEO basics that are needed to set a good optimization foundation for your store.
The SEO Score is an algorithm based on more than 20 factors and measures the ranking performance of your store.
A higher score indicates that the data used by search engines to rank your store in the results (SERPs) is in good shape. SEO Backpack analyzes:
- How many of your products, categories, manufacturers and information pages have SEO-friendly URLs
- How many of your products, categories and information pages have Meta titles, descriptions and keywords
- Whether you have structured data enabled for your products and breadcrumbs
SEO Backpack is designed to take all of this manual work and do it for you with just a few clicks.
And you can do most of the work straight from the extension’s dashboard, which shows what can be fixed as well as what has already been fixed.
Let’s continue to the rest of the features in SEO Backpack.
URLs & Linking
The URLs & Linking tab gives you 3 levels of configuration - SEO Links, Custom URL Redirects and Auto-Links.
SEO Links
You can see the total items that are subject to optimized links, how many of them have been optimized and how many of them have missing SEO links.
The Generate button fixes the links automatically, while the Start Fresh button removes all URLs and creates new ones.
How does the extension generate those links? Click the Advanced icon to learn.
The parameters used to create those links are the names of your product, category, manufacturer or information page. Other parameters included are model name, SKU, etc.
This means that whatever names you configure for your items, they will be the ones appearing in the SEO link generated by the extension.
Custom URL Redirects
If you want to create a custom URL redirect, you can do it manually here. Click the Add New Custom URL button, choose the current route of the page and enter the URL you prefer to have.
URL redirects are useful if you want redirect the flow of traffic and search engine crawlers from one URL to another, in case you have moved the page temporarily or permanently.
Done? Click Submit.
The tab displays all of the URLs that have a custom redirect so you can keep track of them and modify them in the future.
Auto-Links
If you want to cross-link with other pages in your store or external websites, you can choose the keywords that will be turned into links.
Choose the keyword and enter the URL address you want it leading to.
Hit Submit when you’re done.
Content
The Content tab is where you can manually configure all of the Meta data in your OpenCart store.
This includes Titles, Descriptions and Keywords.
All of them are usually configured one by one when you add and modify products, categories, manufacturers or information pages.
However, SEO Backpack allows you to optimize them automatically with a few clicks.
Let’s see an example with the missing Meta description for one of the information pages in our test OpenCart store - the Privacy Policy.
It’s shown in the Missing Descriptions field and we can fix it by hitting the Generate button:
The change has been made and we can see the update in the notification. The Meta description is now optimized for search engines.
Let’s do the same for the Meta keywords now. We see that we have missing ones for some of our products, categories and information pages.
We’ll hit the Generate button on all of them.
The reports show us the applied changes and we are now certain that our Meta keywords are optimized properly. Here is the result after refreshing:
Social SEO
The social features of SEO Backpack let you enable Open Graph for Facebook as well as Twitter Cards.
These options are used to show additional objects and information in social media posts.
Hreflang tags are also part of SEO Backpack. A feature with huge value for OpenCart stores serving customers from around the world. They are used to serve the correct language or URL to the user’s search results.
A powerful SEO feature that also improves user experience for customers who visit your store from different countries.
Structured Data
If you’re unfamiliar with structured data, this is highly organized information that is easy and predictable for search engines to display. The markup format we use is the one that Google recommends - JSON-LD.
You can use SEO Backpack to enable structured data for product pages, product breadcrumbs and store information.
The format we use includes a small JavaScript notation separately of the HTML body, which makes the extension more flexible and compatible with various OpenCart themes as well as custom designs.
Image Names
The names of each image in your store is also scanned by search engines. Given that E-Commerce stores tend to have a lot of images in them, it will be a shame not to take advantage of that opportunity.
The Image Rename tool in SEO Backpack generates new names for all the product images in your OpenCart store using the product and model name of the item.
Other parameters you can use for the names are the short codes for your products’ SKU and UPC data.
Remember to backup your data before renaming all of your images with the tool!
Page Crawler
One of the things that we’re most proud of - our in-house page crawler. It’s used to analyze your OpenCart store ranking performance and show you how it’s viewed by search engines.
What’s being scanned by the crawler?
- Server Response Time
- HTTP (SSL) Availability
- Title Tag
- Description Tag
- Canonical Tag
- Open Graph Data
- Twitter Cards Data
- Heading Titles
All of those parameters amount to a higher SEO score and the crawler will help you indicate which of them are a weak spot for your site’s ranking performance.
Additional Features
A couple more features that are present in SEO Backpack are the Search Engine Analytics and the File Editor tab.
Search Engine Analytics
You can use the search engine analytics to see which crawler browsed your site and the exact pages that were checked. This will let you know which pages will most probably be indexed by search engines soon.
File Editor
To start using SEO URLs in OpenCart, there are a couple minor file changes you have to make. The File Editor tab shows has instructions about what you need to change
If you want to make custom redirects or additional rewrites, you can use the Text Editor to make the necessary changes to your htaccess file.
Learn more about these features in the extension demo!
Wrapping Up
As you see, SEO Backpack is an OpenCart extension that works both for inexperienced users, as well as ones who know what they are doing when it comes to search engine optimization. It allows quick fixes with a click of a button, as well as deeper and more comprehensive configurations.
