How To Setup Magento 2 SEO?

Importance of SEO

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Search Engine Land defines search engine optimization (SEO) as the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines. Among these, organic traffic from search engines through SEO is of paramount importance for e-commerce websites to be successful. Among all e-commerce platforms, Magento is the most powerful in terms of SEO. As for Magento 2, it provides better SEO options. It helps to increase the chance of good SEO by allowing website admin to implement it. SEO is always changing; falling behind can result in a crushing blow for many businesses. If you want to increase your sales and leads, reach new customers, improve brand credibility, gain market share or build trust and credibility, SEO is the way.

Ready to reap the rewards of Magento 2 SEO?

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Magento 2 SEO Features

• Robots.txt is now editable from the Admin panel.
• XML Sitemap: priority and frequency for each page type, robots.txt file integration.
• Layered Navigation: canonical tag.
• Pagination: canonical tag.
• Category Page: meta tags, SEO-friendly category URL key.
• Product Page: metadata, canonical tag, product URLs.
• Product Image Labels is another Magento 2 SEO feature.
• Rich Snippets are the most anticipated Magento 2 SEO feature.
• Schema.org is added to a default Magento 2 Template.
• Related products, Upsells, and Cross-sells are also optimized in Magento 2.
• Google Tag Manager is a unique feature of Magento 2 Enterprise Edition.
• Universal Google Analytics, E-commerce Tracking, and AdWords Conversion are available out-of- the-box.

Magento 2 SEO Settings

Let’s take a look at the steps one by one.

Enabling SEO

Enable SEO configuration by navigating to Store => Configuration => Web => Search Engines Optimization => Use Web Server Rewrites => Yes. Another good thing to configure is “Add Store Code to URLs” under “URL Options”. In most cases, it is better to set this functionality to “No”.

Metadata

Metadata is essential for a website. Ensure that you have filled out all meta information for all your CMS pages, Product detail, and Category pages. Also, include at least five keywords that are necessary for pages and your business. This will be useful for the search engines to determine the page based on the user search item.

To include metadata in CMS Page:

To include in Product detail page Product -> Catalog -> Add/Edit Product:

To include in Category page, navigate to Product -> Categories -> Add/Edit Categories:

Robots.txt

robots.txt file in the root folder of the Magento will determine the architecture of your website for crawlers. Navigate to Admin panel -> Stores -> Configuration -> Design -> Search Engine Robots You can see following options:

• INDEX, FOLLOW
• NOINDEX, FOLLOW
• INDEX, NOFOLLOW
• NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW

In the “Edit Custom instruction” of robots.txt file field, enter custom instructions if needed. “Reset to Default” button will restore the default instructions.

Sitemap.xml

Sitemap.xml has to be created and submitted to search engine. This will help the search engine to find the list of URLs in the website along with any additional information about the URLs. To do so, navigate to Store => Configuration => Catalog => XML Sitemap and set your frequency to generate sitemap.xml

No Duplicate Content

Be careful that there is no duplicate content on both CMS and Product pages. There are chances that a product has been assigned to multiple categories. This means that two URLs will have the same content. Do get rid of this, navigate to System =>Configuration =>Catalog =>Search Engine Optimization => set Canonical Link URLs => Yes Use category path for the product URLs by navigating to System => Configuration => Catalog => Use Categories Path for Product URLs => yes. This will avoid duplicate content by generating the proper URLs for the products.

Images

Another checklist is to take a look at the images. Meaningful and relevant name to the image files helps to boost SEO. It is also a good practice to provide the “alt” keyword for the “img” tag.

CSS and JS

Ensure that you don’t have CSS and JS on your HTML page. Use external file for JS and CSS, and include them in the page using layout.xml.

Changing Page Titles

When you install Magento, it automatically gives you a few page titles like “Magento Commerce”.  To change that navigate to Configuration => Design => HTML Head and give the title relevant to your website.

Google API

You can enable Google API to track the store and customer activities along with the keyword and traffic source. You can enable it by navigating to Stores = >configuration => sales =>Google API Another parameter that helps SEO is by adding rich snippets like rating stars, price, currency, image, video to your store. This is enabled by default. Last but not the least, check your page optimization to make your page to load faster. Search engines will give more weight to the faster websites.

• Check your PHP, JS and CSS logic to make the page faster.
• Make sure you don’t have 404 pages and links in your store
• Make sure you have 301 redirect enabled. 301 redirect is a permanent redirect. Search engines will be informed as 301 when the web page is redirected to another URL. This is the best way to perform redirects.

Magento 2 is  SEO-friendly by default and it provides various options to configure SEO. The blog has described how to set up Magento 2 but we have just scratched the surface…there are many more ways to optimize site URLs, page titles, meta and ALT tags, headings, and other web site elements. There are also third-party extensions available to improve SEO capabilities.

We have highlighted the steps to setup Magento 2 SEO. If you have queries or comments, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us.

Can your online store have better SEO? Let our experts check it out.

Magento 2 comes with an inbuilt dashboard and advanced SEO features for your business. Get your Magento 2 store built by our team of Magento developers Now.

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