Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is how you tell search engines what each part of your store is about. UltraCart lets you set it at three levels: once for the whole storefront, again for an individual page, and again for an individual item. The narrower setting wins, so the storefront-wide values act as a fallback for anything you have not filled in.

StoreFront themes already generate clean URLs, which are short, descriptive, and free of query strings. You do not have to configure that.

Storefront SEO settings

Go to Main Menu → StoreFronts → [select your storefront] → Search Engine Optimization.

Field	What it does
Default Meta Description	A description of your store, 275 to 300 characters. Search engines may show it under your listing. Pages and items without their own description fall back to this one.
Default Keywords	Keywords that apply across the storefront.
Enable Canonical Links	Tells search engines which URL is the definitive one for an item that appears in more than one place. See Canonical links.
Enable Schema.org	Outputs structured data so search engines can identify prices, availability, and ratings. See Structured data with schema.org.
Prevent Search Engines from Indexing	Hides the whole storefront from search engines. Use it while you are building the site, and turn it off before you launch.

warning

Prevent Search Engines from Indexing applies to the entire storefront. If it is still on after launch, none of your pages will appear in search results.

Page-level SEO

Each StoreFront page carries its own SEO fields, which override the storefront defaults for that page.

1. Go to Main Menu → StoreFronts → [select your storefront] → Pages.

2. Open the page and select the Search Engine Optimization tab.

   

3. Fill in the fields for this page.

   

4. Select Save Page or Save and Preview before you navigate away.

Item-level SEO

Items carry SEO fields too, which is what search engines read for a product page.

1. Go to Main Menu → Items → Item Management and select the item ID to open the item.

   

2. Scroll to the Search Engine Optimization section and fill in the fields.

   

3. Select Save before you navigate away.

note

Item-level SEO fields only appear on items that are assigned to a storefront.

Canonical links

A canonical link tells a search engine which URL is the definitive one for a piece of content. It exists to solve duplicate content, which is the same content served at two different addresses. Search engines treat unexplained duplication as an attempt to game rankings.

Duplication is often deliberate and reasonable. Say you sell a battery that suits both radio controlled planes and radio controlled cars, so you assign it to both category pages. That is a legitimate reason for one item to live at two URLs, and the canonical tag is how you say so. The served page carries a tag like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://patiopads.com/products/umbrellas/matching-umbrellas/UM908.html" />

Turn canonical links on

On the Search Engine Optimization tab, select Enable Canonical Links.

How UltraCart picks the canonical URL

UltraCart chooses the deepest and longest assignment, so the search engine gets the most semantic meaning from the URL. Take an item assigned in five places:

https://store.fakecoffeeshop.com/AwesomeCoffee.html
https://store.fakecoffeeshop.com/shop/AwesomeCoffee.html
https://store.fakecoffeeshop.com/roast/organic-medium-roast-coffee/AwesomeCoffee.html
https://store.fakecoffeeshop.com/shop/organic-ground-coffee/AwesomeCoffee.html
https://store.fakecoffeeshop.com/shop/organic-whole-bean-coffee/AwesomeCoffee.html

The canonical URL is:

https://store.fakecoffeeshop.com/roast/organic-medium-roast-coffee/AwesomeCoffee.html

It won because it is two pages deep, and because its URL is the longest of the two-page-deep options.

You can also choose the canonical assignment yourself. When an item is assigned to more than one page, the item editor shows a checkbox on each assignment that marks it canonical.

If you leave canonical links off

You are fine as long as you never assign an item to more than one location on your storefront. The setting is a choice so that you can tune the site the way you want.

Where to go next

• Sitemaps and crawling: where your sitemap lives, how to submit it to Google Search Console, and how to control crawlers with robots.txt.
• Structured data with schema.org: enable structured data and add the ITEMSTRUCTUREDDATA element to item pages.
• Optimizing for AI search: what changes when an AI assistant cites your store instead of linking to it.
• StoreFront migration best practices: custom URLs and 301 redirects when you move an existing store onto StoreFronts.