Migrate to Magento 2 to witness the benefits of built-in SEO features for your online store.
With eCommerce growing exponentially every year, the challenges and obstacles of 2017 will soon be forgotten let alone the mishaps. As we approach the new year, it’s mandatory that we learn from these experiences in order to build a better strategy. With Magento, there’s a first time for everything. Whether you’re a back-end developer just starting out with Magento or an experienced developer trying to set out an effective strategy for 2018, you’ll need a clear plan that sets it straight this time.
In this post, I’ve compiled a list of few most helpful tips that can help you build an SEO strategy for the year to come.
Contents
The Basics Checks
Metadata is the most important and absolutely relevant information needed to showcase a website in the world of internet. A detailed description of the particular page and the business should be addressed clearly. This is necessary because the search engines use this information to determine what results to show. The same applies to your product pages. It is important that you fill the metadata section with detailed information that accurately describes your product. Even in the event of updating the descriptions, make sure that you create unique description content every time and refrain from duplicating the content.
The use of images for the products can also be helpful. It is important that these images are relevant and tagged with appropriate metadata and alt text. Doing so means that your product appears in image-based searches as well.
Keep your URL short and to the point. With the use of Web Configurations, you can remove irrelevant keywords that unnecessarily make your URL long. It is always a good idea to have a keyword-rich URL that is user-friendly and avoid using the words such as “the” or “and”.
Research and Optimize
If you’re planning on revamping your website or SEO strategy, the first thing you should be doing is conducting keyword research. If you strategically place relevant keywords on your website, there’s a good chance that you’ll get high-quality traffic. When looking for the right keywords, make sure they are relevant to your products and business and have a high search volume. Once you have a list of the most relevant and effective keywords, everything else in your SEO checklist will align. 
The loading speed of pages also play an important role in the ranking of your website. It is recommended that you optimize the PHP code and run tests to make sure that you have an optimum speed. An efficient hosting for your Magento powered website might also be significant.
The use of a good host and server configuration using the best cache plugins can improve the speed of your Magento store significantly. I recommend Cloudways Managed Magento Hosting. The company offers an optimized stack with Full Page Cache plugin for Magento 1 and Varnish for Magento 2.
Keep up With the Trends
Search engines are constantly improving the quality of results and there are a lot of factors that they consider. Speed is definitely a key factor in search engines’ algorithm when we talk about new and changing trends. If your website loads fast, you have the edge over others even when trends change. While better speed improves user experience, it simultaneously improves your website ranking.
One of the most prominent trends is the rise in the use of eCommerce websites from the mobile phones. Among the many ranking factors is mobile-friendliness and making the site mobile friendly is of paramount importance. Tweaking the site from the SEO point of view should bring pretty great results and also better ranking to your site.
Similarly, there are other trends that create traction and search engines use them as ranking factors. It is always better to keep up with the shifts in trends of your local industry and look out for search engines’ updates.
The information summed up in this article is just the tip of the iceberg and there are loads and lots of things to take care when it comes to making your site healthy and busy.
