SEO and Redirects
Titles and descriptions, sitemaps, robots, and sending old addresses somewhere useful.
Settings, SEO holds what search engines are told, and Settings, Redirects sends old addresses to new ones.
Titles and Descriptions
Every product, category and page carries an SEO title and description. Left blank, the shop uses the item's own name and the first part of its content, which is usually fine.
Fill them in deliberately for the handful that matter: your homepage, your main categories, and anything you are actively trying to be found for. Writing them for three hundred products is work with very little return.
Addresses
The slug is the address, and it is the thing worth settling early and never changing.
Changing a slug breaks every link to it
Every link anybody saved, shared, printed or published points at the old address. Search engines have to find the new one and rank it again from scratch. If you must change one, add a redirect at the same time.
Redirects
Settings, Redirects maps an old address to a new one.
Use it whenever you change a slug or delete a page, and especially when moving from a previous shop, where years of links point at addresses that no longer exist. A redirect turns a dead end into an arrival, and costs nothing.
Redirects are also how you tidy up: a long address somebody printed on a flyer can be replaced with a short one that redirects to it.
Sitemap
The shop publishes a sitemap at /sitemap.xml automatically, listing your products, categories and pages. Search engines find it on their own, and you can submit it directly in their webmaster tools to speed up a new shop being indexed.
Robots
/robots.txt tells crawlers what to ignore. The defaults exclude the admin, the API, the basket, the checkout and account pages, which is what you want: none of those should ever appear in a search result.
Custom rules can be added for anything particular to your shop.
Discourage search engines switches the whole shop off from crawling, for a shop being built or one only shown to people you send there. It is a request rather than a lock, so do not use it to hide anything that actually matters.
Analytics and Tags
Settings, SEO is also where Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and the Meta pixel are configured. Paste the identifier rather than the whole script.
If a tag is not firing, the usual cause is the content security policy blocking it rather than the identifier being wrong. That is under Settings, CSP.
What Actually Moves the Needle
In rough order: having pages worth linking to, a shop that loads quickly on a phone, product names that match what people search for, and descriptions written for a reader rather than stuffed with terms.
Everything on this page helps a search engine understand a shop that is already worth finding. None of it substitutes for that.