Magento SEO: A Tough Yet Necessary Aspect

In the growing online marketplace, to carry a business means to have a good website. In the eCommerce, it becomes the need of the hour as your online customers are the soul of your business and you can’t communicate them in any other way. So, it is a do-or-die situation to keep a beautiful website and stay updated with all the updations going on each day to retain your glory.

Another important scenario to notice is that competitors in the businesses are increasing in the same manner as the online users are. The best practice to follow in the current stage is to be perfect in each respect and give more than 100% in improving your website appearance.

There are multiple platforms available to build an e-store, but Magento remains the first choice of the major crowd to lay the foundation of their business.
If you are also planning to have an online store, your first priority must be to assure that customers will find you, else having a tempting website does not make sense if no one is using it. The best solution here is to employ a robust SEO strategy that enables your website to rank better in the SERPs and be visible among the deserving crowd.

SEO in Magento – Not So Easy Task

Although Magento comprises a plethora of features to make an engaging store, it is not so easy task to work over it from SEO point of view. This is because of the issues like complex code base, dynamic content dependency and hassles in rewriting engine. Moreover, when it comes to discussing SEO in Magento, the importance raises few more points as in this platform success depends on how attractive and delightful website design you have.

While working with the Magento platform, there are a plenty of factors that need to be considered to keep your website stand out from the crowd and push it to top the list.

• Product Pages:

Products are the soul of any online store and thus they must be thoroughly scrutinized to offer ease to the customers. Content must be detailed, but make sure that it will not drag out. Metadata section must be filled with detailed information about the product so that people will easily find your store. Also, update the URL Key to create a more search engine friendly URL for your products.

• Images:

Images are an integral element in both SEO and online store. As an e-store has many product images, it creates more effect on it than on any other kinds of websites. Try to use meaningful file names for the images that must describe what an image is all about. Remember to implement title and alt tags on your images to give information about the page to the spiders that they would not get otherwise.

• Canonical Tag

It is an excellent approach to use in the case of duplicate pages to prevent them from being indexed. It is done by canonicalizing it back to the parent category page. There are few exceptions where the canonical tag has been ignored by the search engines, such as when you have different pages, and also if they are already indexed. It can take you away from the search engine to adapt to the changes.

• Web Configuration

One of the beneficial approaches to optimize a Magento site within the SEO Options is within the website configuration. Go to System->Configuration->Web on the admin panel of the website. Change here the setting “Add Store Code to URLs” as “No” to prevent unnecessary keywords out of the URL. Likewise, set “Server URL Rewrite” to “Yes” under Search Engine Optimization to remove “index.php” from all URLs for the same reason.

• Redirects

In Magento, there is a provision in the backend to set permanent redirects if the URL is changed. The potential rewrite issues must be taken into consideration while you’re regularly performing URL key changes or doing any CSV uploads.

• Robots.txt

Make the default settings of the robots.txt file as INDEX, FOLLOW” so that search engines can index your site and show it in search results. You have to ensure that robots.txt file allows robots to crawl your site. There is no use of running a live URL if it has not been noticed by the spiders.

Few smart tips for Product Pages:

As the products are the crucial element in the eCommerce, some extra effort must be put to optimize the product pages.

• Use long-tail keywords for higher likelihood to attract a customer
• Customer reviews must be included as an integral part to establish credibility
• Focus on search-friendly URLs that will be optimized for the primary keyword of the page
• Make it mobile optimized for fast loading and better conversions.
• Make use of the rich snippets within meta description to display product description.
• Work on page load speed for hassle-free user experience.
• Social media must be integrated into your product page for easy sharing.

Conclusion

Magento web development is a quite easy process to deliver quality web designs, but it gains much more importance when SEO strategies are efficiently implemented into the web design. Following the above tips can surely help you succeed in your business goals along with a noticeable traffic.

Author Bio

Paul Schroer is an experienced Magento developer working with PSDtoMagentoDeveloper from past few years. He has a great interest in writing informative blogs related to the Magento platform in order to share his extensive knowledge with the passionate readers.