In the growing online marketplace, to carry a sound website is the need of the hour and you can’t communicate with your online customers, i.e soul of your business in any other way. So, it is a do-or-die situation to keep a beautiful website and stay updated with all the improvements going on each day to retain your glory.
Another important scenario to keep a close eye on is the speed with which competitors are expanding with the online users. The best practice to follow in the current stage is to be perfect in all respect and give more than 100% in improving your website appearance.
Magento remains the first choice of the major crowd to build an e-store among the multiple available platforms. The reason here is to have a plethora of features that can be best utilized with this eCommerce platform.
If you are also planning to have an online store, your first priority should be to focus that your customers will find you, without which all your efforts will get wasted because no one is going to notice your tempting website. 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 and Magento- A Tricky Mix
SEO seems to be a very common topic among the business world, but there are few complications while adopting this technique in the Magento sites. The issues like dynamic content dependency, complex code base and hassles in rewriting engine create problems in employing the optimization strategies.
While doing the Magento development, there are so many factors that needs to be utmost taken care of to take out your business to the zenith-
1. Product Pages:
Products are the soul element of any online store and need to be thoroughly scrutinized to offer ease to the customers. Below key factors must be noticed for better results-
- Content must be detailed but must not drag out.
- Metadata section must be equipped with detailed product info so that the customers will easily find you.
- URL Key must be updated to create a better search engine friendly URL for your products.
2. 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.
- Also, use title and alt tags with the images to give information about the page to the spiders that they would not get otherwise.
3. 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.
4. Canonical Tag:
It is an excellent approach for preventing the duplicate pages from being indexed. It is then made canonical back to the parent category page. There might be few exceptions where the canonical tags are ignored by the search engines,
- when you have different pages, and
- if they are already indexed.
It can take you away from the search engine to adapt to the changes.
5. Web Configuration:
Website configuration is one of the beneficial approaches under the headings of the SEO options to optimize a Magento site.
- Go to System->Configuration->Web on the admin panel of the website.
- Fix the setting “Add Store Code to URLs” to “No” for preventing the unnecessary keywords out of the URL.
- Similarly, set “Server URL Rewrite” under Search Engine Optimization to “Yes” to remove “index.php” from all URLs.
6. Redirects:
There is a provision in Magento in the back-end to set permanent redirects when the URL is changed. The potential rewrite issues must be taken into consideration for doing any CSV uploads or while doing URL key changes.
7. Site Speed:
A site with good loading speed can give you the best results because the users will love to visit those URLs that load instantly.
- Enable the caching features by going through cache management.
- Reduce the number of external files.
- Merge CSS and JS files.
8. Google Sitemap:
Preparing a Google sitemap is a beneficial step that lets you know about the site link and the related information for the search engines to crawl.
Success Mantra for Better Ranking
To perform well in the eyes of Google, there are few of the basic considerations that need to be focused for better ranking.
1. Visibility- It simply means to get your site indexed by the crawlers. Crawlers are the Google bots that explore over the web and scan the page, title, content and HTML available. For Magento, it is advisable to focus more on the content as these stores have product images in major and the information is generally remains invisible to the search engines.
Here, some basic improvements can be made in the Magento websites to get them read-
- Flat URLs without any odd characters
- Automatic sitemap generated
- Well-structured HTML
- Optimizing SEO assets such as meta data and page titles
2. Relevance- Being relevant means to have an eCommerce site that contains the right set of keywords. All the elements are pointing in the same direction as per the context and given keywords. Keyword strategy here is qualitative, quantitative, analytical and creative.
3. Popularity- To become popular completes more than half battle for you. Each website possesses a unique page rank that counts how often Google visits you. Google webmaster tools can also be used for a more precise measure.
Apart from these 3 pillars, measuring the number of visitors, websites linking to you and other technical recommendations play an important role in making out the best from an e-store.
Conclusion
Magento web development is a quite easy yet important process to deliver quality web designs, but it becomes more productive when SEO strategies are efficiently implemented. Following the above tips can surely help you succeed in your business goals and thus getting a noticeable traffic for a sustainable growth.
Author’s Bio
Paul Schroer is an experienced Magento developer with keen interest in writing knowledgeable blogs related to Magento. He works at PSDtoMagentoDeveloper from past few years.
