SEO for Magento has evolved considerably over the last five years and we are now as Web-masters lucky enough to have access to a comprehensive list of instructions and guidelines, to make the discipline work for our sites. It’s no secret that an obvious way to achieve customer acquisition online, is success via Google. It is the most widely used search engine, therefore success rests upon doing well on it. Many of the techniques we are going to look at have been developed with Google in mind. The useful techniques to adopt in SEO for Magento can easily be added to existing SEO strategies. Let’s take a look at what those are:
If you are going to change your URL from a www. to a non-www. just make sure you create a redirect from the www. version, so you don’t lose customers entering the wrong URL.
Search engines place more emphasis on words at the start of pages, so make sure your keywords are included in the opening paragraphs of your on-site content.
When it comes to your title you should get rid off the default “Magento Commerce” and replace it with something more descriptive and memorable, as this title will be used on all non-content pages.
At first glance Magento may lack some decent CMS functionality, but its simplicity means that you can control every aspect of your pages. Once you’ve added quality content to each CMS page, pick a SEF URL Identifier and page title and go to the Meta Data tab to write a description for each CMS page that you would like to rank.
To make sure your users can cache css and javascript files at the first attempt and to ensure search engines don’t have to download them, move all javascript and css from your template files, to your external javascript and css files.
Another easy way to help optimise your Magento site is to stop linking to your login, checkout, wish list, and all other non-content pages. There is no Magento plugin to do this for you, you have to go to your template files and add “no follow” to those links.
To help search engines to understand any duplicate content on your pages, you can suggest the preferred version of the URL for each page. You can do this via the canonical URL tag, which you have to install.
What will also increase your sites online success is its popularly. If Goggle sees your site is popular, it will automatically rank it higher. You can achieve popularity by increasing the number of links to your site. If you produce relevant and interesting content via your blog for example, other sites may reference it on their site and link to it. You could also provide surveys or games that other Web-masters may link to. Social Media is also an incredibly handy tool here. If you provide share buttons which users use to share your content direct to their Facebook and Twitter pages, your perceived popularity by Google will increase hugely.
Magento is one of the most search engine friendly eCommerce platforms out there. Through implementing the techniques listed above in-conjunction with filling your site with quality content that other users will want to share, you can ensure that Google will notice you, approve of how you are approaching SEO and reward you by ranking your site highly.
