Few Essential SEO Tips for Magento eCommerce Website

There have been questions about SEO friendliness of Magento. However as it evolved over the years, Magento has become one of the most SEO friendly eCommerce platforms. To capitalize out of the box SEO features of Magento and to increase sales performance, there are few minor tweaks that should be made so search engine won’t hold a resentment against you.

In this presentation we have complied some of the best tips to help your Magento SEO.

#1. Set Your Preferred Domain

Don’t let the WWW and no-WWW version of your magento eCommerce website compete for rankings or create canonical issue since you can easily fix this issues easily.

Go to “Secure” and “Unsecure” Base URL which is located in the core_config_datatable in phpMyAdmin to set this preference within Magento and then enforce it by using two ways given below:

• Enforce a 301 redirect to a preferred version with a mod_rewrite in your .htaccess file

• Opt your preferred version in Google Webmaster Tool

#2. Enable Server URL Rewrites & Disable Store Codes in URLS

You can consider this step as one of the simplest methods to get more control over URL of your website. Since search engines evaluate the URLs when determining the ranking and relevance (target keyword in URL and dynamic character strings etc), you need to make sure that you have taken care to keep such things short, simple and clean.

To perform this, go to System -> Configuration -> Web -> Search Engine Optimization and under “Use Web Server Rewrites” simply check the “Yes”. This ensures that the index.php no more will display at the end and URL is clearly readable for Search Engine Crawlers.

#3. Use Tiered XML Sitemaps

You may already be using XML sitemap but you might not know about the “sitemap of sitemaps”, this actually breaks out the categories into more bite-sized chunks for a search robots to index the pages easily. This reduces the long, awkward length of sitemap that can cause webpages listed at the bottom of sitemap to be ignored.

Break out your sitemap for each large section, then list the URL’s of the other sitemaps in a primary sitemap.

Now in your admin panel, go to Catalog -> Google Sitemap -> Add Sitemap and add you primary sitemap and then you need to add that sitemap to your robots.txt file. Now you can add your sitemap in Google Webmaster Tool.

#4. Disable the Category Name in the URL Path

Adding category name in the URL may reduce the messy URLS and loads of duplicate content problems. In order to maintain control and avoid such issues, go to System -> Configuration -> Catalog -> Search Engine Optimization and change the “Use categories path for product URLs” to “No”.

#5. Eliminate Empty Robot Metas

Magento has one weird tendency to show the no-set meta robots tags given below:

<meta name=”robots” content=”*” />

This can be a problem for search engines so it is advisable to remove them from your code. There are pretty good extensions ready to use available that can handle this issues quite nicely.

#6. Move JavaScript and CSS files into external file instead of Templates

Messy templates don’t help in improving your Magento SEO. By moving JavaScript and CSS files into external files, you can make sure that the users cache them on their first load and prevent search engines from having to download them over and over again. Make note that, here you need to combine these files into concentrated external file instead of having dozens of external ones.

Reducing number of files to be downloaded can hugely improve the performance of your Magento eCommerce website.

The thing here to keep in mind is stylesheets. Magento doesn’t handle these, combining stylesheets into just a single new one to keep the things buzzing quickly.

#7. Don’t Overlook the Image Optimization, Unique Title & Description

In many cases due to tight deadlines optmizing image sizes , adding titles and descriptions are likely to be overlooked . Make sure that you take time out to optimize each product image for both; search engines and the visually impaired. You can give image a product name instead of a generic filename such as image10.jpg. Search engines use the file name when determining the image rankings.

Magento provides you a full access to give a unique meta title and description – so use it efficiently for SEO benefits.

Keep unique title and description for each product and category pages.

#8. Build for Users

We have talked lot about technical terms, but there is one more thing which you need to keep on top in your chart and that is your site should be made in a way that users can easily access all the features. Search Engines dislike poor content quality, confusing navigation, messy website structure and slow speed. These are few essential things you should keep in mind for SEO during Magento eCommerce website development.

Tweak your technical elements but make sure that your visitors have good experience of browsing your website which ideally should be informative, clear and unique content, interactive yet very easy to use, quick – particularly check out, no bugs, optimized yet attractive product images, no miscommunication with very clear instruction about your products, services and processes, mobile friendly website structure (responsive), adding videos and few other things can result in amazing conversions.

We are result driven and highly creative bespoke magento development agency. Our Passion, imagination and experience drive what we do, crafting eCommerce solutions in magento that engage your customers and deliver on your business objectives. Get in touch with us today to see our brilliant portfolio.

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