Whether you have newly started a Magento store or are already working with this great ecommerce tool, SEO plays an extremely important role in bringing up the count of traffic, search engine ranking and ultimately, sales. The SEO tips applied generally often work for your Magento extensions too, and there are also some Magento-specific rules to follow.
1. Importance of Content
The importance of content is well-known and it is reemphasized by Google’s Matt Cutts who suggests that your content should be unique and relevant so as to bring people to your page and keep them engaged. Creating a blog is great for bringing more organic traffic to your Magento store. Only writing about products or services can be augmented by promoting them on social media, news and all those places which can bring you a quick burst of traffic. Even though these bursts are short, they are helpful for making your products more known to others than earlier. You can also make use of Magento blog extension or WordPress to write more in your niche.
2. SEO Factors – Magento On Page
You need to first pay attention to On Page Magento SEO because they are more easily achievable. Extensions like Magento SEOSpace can tremendously improve SEO functionalities which help in optimizing page content, Meta descriptions, canonical URLs, image titles and many more things.
3. Name and Description of Product
Several Magento stores populate their catalog directly without even taking a look at it. Actually people search for product names and their descriptions. Even though you have to cover a big catalog, it is pretty necessary to customize the names and descriptions of your products, including the keywords, most searched for. You just have to edit these two and give a more SEO friendly name to the product which real humans are searching. Use Google Adword and other tools for keywords to understand what are other keywords that are being searched for a certain keyword.
4. CMS Page
Majority of Magento stores use CMS pages for things like “Terms of Use”, “About Us”, etc. This is not wrong – in fact, it is good, but what to do about keywords you want to target?
Try to add more keyword rich content, videos, questions, tours, etc about the products on CMS pages. Even in some cases you can use these pages as landing pages and target specific keywords to attract more traffic.
5. Reviews
You may be surprised to know the importance of product reviews in bringing more sales. This is because new clients are highly impressed by these reviews. You should find out a way to encourage your clients to write good reviews about your services or products which they buy.
6. Meta Title and Description
These two things are what people first see while searching for something on the web. Though Google is able to create their own titles, a keyword-rich Meta title and description is always helpful in giving your product more coverage in search results by offering improved click-through.
As such Magento’s advice about Meta title and description is they should be around 255 characters. But it is ideal to keep the Meta titles ranging between 40 and 60 characters and Meta descriptions between 100 and 155 characters, because many search engines have reduced the character limit.
7. No Keywords!
Due to the earlier practice of using keywords excessively, the real purpose of keywords has been lost. This has resulted in the denial of search engines to use keywords in their algorithm. The suggestions of some Magento SEO shops upon this is to keep the keyword field totally scrapped from a page, so as to keep away from being penalized by search engines, and also, it hides your keyword policy from your competitors.
8. Canonical URLs
Canonical URLs are utmost essential for Magento stores so as to prevent penalization for duplicate content. Fortunately Magento has canonical system already in place. You just have to go to System > Configuration > Catalog > Search Engine Optimizations and select YES for Canonical Link and Meta Tag section.
9. More SEO Settings
Make sure that you use “nofollow” for pages that you don’t want Google to index. Also optimize your Robots.txt file, XML sitemap to lead search engines to what you want them to index and what to ignore. This will also help you to track the happenings.
10. Loading Speed
Today clients are more used to handheld devices and so, are more and more interested in pages that load fast. Therefore a store which is fast responsive will see more visitors while slow loading stores will have a larger bounce rate. Even Google penalizes slow loading sites and prefer fast loading ones. A drop of mere 1 second in loading can make tremendous impact so watch out your loading speed carefully.
Following these SEO tips you can handle your Magento store with much ease and surely get success in your business.