Magento has changed the way we sell products online. With availability of so Magento services, it has helped store owners represent their products in a more effective way.
Magento has changed the way we sell products online. With availability of so many features, it has helped store owners represent their products in a more effective way. In order to make the stores more visible to potential consumers, there are many techniques within Magento to enhance store rankings in search engines. Since most buyers believe in organic results, enhancing SEO is the best way to improve your website and increase visibility in search engines.
Below are the set of techniques which can help you to improve SEO functionalities of your Magento store so that potential customers can find your store with ease.
301 Redirects for Disabled Products
When a product is out of stock, the product is usually removed from the listing. When users reach those products from a search engine, the product page will throw a 404 – Not found error page, which causes a bad user experience. Redirecting users to a different product page that has replaced the specific product is a good idea from an SEO viewpoint as well as a customer outlook. This will also help preserve search positioning and at least maintain any link juice it was passing to the website. Thus, it is always good to go with a 301 redirect.
Multi-store Magento Implementations
In a multi-store Magento implementation, and distinctively if you are selling the identical product on multiple sites, it’s going to be complicated when it comes to SEO. Taking into account that you are hosting it on the same server, it would also come under the same IP block. The product descriptions, titles and Meta descriptions also get disorganized. When you decide to use multiple stores and develop your CMS in Magento(or any other ecommerce platform for that matter), make sure that you maintain unique product descriptions, Meta titles and Meta tags.
URL Rewrites
Enabling URL re-writes in Magento is particularly useful for product category pages. Using related and high quality keywords in the URLs for your category pages will definitely help your search engine efforts at a later stage. Analyze your keywords page wisely and use the most effective ones in the URLs.
Meta Data
There are three types of Meta data to consider. The Meta Title which will be seen at the top of your customer’s browser. The Meta Keywords which are not included in ranking factors, however is still good practice to include them. Meta Descriptions are included by Google (sometimes) in little snippets in search results pages. This means that you are better off writing the Meta data for all your web pages with relevant keywords and descriptions for your pages.
Go to Catalog > Manage Products. Click the product you want to edit, click “Meta Information” on the left and edit the “Meta Title” field. You can set the Meta Information for the “Default Values” and for each “Store View”. Note that for the “Meta Title”, this will overwrite the complete page title, including categories. This does not include the title prefix, suffix and product name.
Site Maps
Creating an XML site map is one of the most effective methods to help Google bots crawl your site efficiently. The essential content of the website gets instantly recognized and indexed by Google. It’s like providing a walk through to your website for the Google crawlers or any other search engine for that matter. For Magento, you get an built-in feature to create site maps for your store.
Google Analytics
Magento also comes with an option for Google Analytics integration. You can enable it to get SEO statistics for your online store.
Though Magento is an effective Ecommerce platform, it requires definite tweaks for making it well-suited for search engines. Thus, a structured platform with enhanced SEO techniques will enable to achieve profitability for your Ecommerce business.
