The Magento eCommerce platform is sufficiently scalable, flexible and ready for your increasing online business targets. Magento is one of the most popular business e-commerce tools. Like any other web platform, Magento can and should be managed to obtain SEO (search engine optimization). This article will provide users of Magento e-commerce sites to optimize their websites for SEO.
Implement Magento Multistore carefully
One of the greatest advantages of Magento is its inherent ability to support multiple stores. A single administration and interface will manage all orders, your products and every other thing. This benefit can act negatively for search engine optimisation. Often the developers use same product description for similar products that are sold through multiple sites. Repetition of exact information on each site for these similar products means that you are duplicating yourself. This allegation becomes strong when your multiple sites use same IP block depending on the host.
Setting the header
Your Magento install will have a title of “Magento commerce” by default; you need to change it. You need to remember few things to draw traffic in your online store. Search engines put weightage on preliminary words; so putting keywords at the beginning of the page can ensure a better rank. Even those scanning search results can only view those early words. They will click on the page if the keywords are at the beginning. All people do not rely on the brand name while performing search. So select keywords carefully. If you add common keywords that may be used for a product search this will help product pages to rank in long tail searches.
Managing site images
A neglected aspect in Magento SEO is how to manage images. You will surely achieve extra traffic by writing suitable alt tags for images and sincerely deciding the name of the image files. The images will have the product title by default which you can rename with some extra effort.
Optimising the categories
The most important fields to consider when improving your Magento Site SEO are :
Meta description: this part will appear in the search result and you need to put an attractive description in this part.
Page title: it is better to keep this section empty so that you can use category name in addition to parent categories. If you wish to customise this portion, select a title exactly similar to your input and without parent category.
URL key: Create short yet keyword rich URL. It is a good idea to avoid stop words like “and”, “for”, “the” and many others.
Specify name, metadata, title and description for each store. It is a great feature when you have a Multilanguage store.
Speed is an important Ranking and conversion factor
“How quickly your shop loads”- is a vital factor in terms of making conversion as well as SEO. Attracting people in your site is only the primary work done. Your main aim is to engage them and guide them to make purchase. However, if the pages take enough time to load; there are competitors. Modern people have time constraint and they will switch to a website that takes lesser time to load. The search engine spiders will crawl on maximum pages each day if your online shop loads quickly.
Disabled Products
A common condition that most online shop owners experience is when a popular product is disabled. It is possible that a particular product attracts much attention and thus has thousands of inbound links. When the website disabled that product, users and search engine land on a 404 error page if they clicked on the dysfunctional URL. It will be most effective from the perspective of user and search engine if they are directed to another page related to the product that no longer exists. Thus, it will create a better user experience and retain the position of search engine that the product used to hold.