Top 10 Ways to Make your Magento-based Ecommerce Site Search Engine Optimized

Ecommerce and online marketing applauds each other’s effort for a common goal of sales generation. To cover the whole story in brief it can finely be said that Magento is the ecommerce platform which is used by 31% ecommerce business owners around the globe in the beginning of 2014 and SEO is its prime accomplice.  According to a report almost 5 billion internet searches are performed each month globally. 75% of the users show a tendency of purchasing products from online store while browsing in any popular search engine. This shows the potentiality of the growing ecommerce industry and Magento with its flexibility being the prime choice.

Every online store owner knows that Magento is the most search-engine friendly platform for ecommerce business. Visibility in the search engine is the first thing for which the whole online marketing campaigns are planned. This is attained through SEO and almost half of Magento store’s extensions are dedicated for this subject. This contributed to the whole store promotion factor and a huge popularity has been witnessed in hiring Magento SEO services among the business owners. Google trend shows a steady peak of interest in the term ‘Magento SEO’ from the beginning of 2014. But just knowing the list of extensions won’t put you in the driving seat of sales generation from your store based on Magento. There are many ways through which the optimization of online store can be done and those are discussed in detail in following part.

1. Consider Search Engine Friendly URL:
Most business owners does not pay attention to this point as they focus more over on-page attributes, but the fact is URL structure is equally important like on-page. Google reads the URL structure and makes a definition analysis of your store. If your product detail page has an URL like http://www.xyz.com/345!uk chances are you are not in the good book of Google when it comes to URL structure as most of the part of the URL is filled with jargon value, you might consider using the structure http://www.xyz.com/products/olive-oil.html  as this is the desired way of crafting it. This can be implemented by going into System>configuration and after that inputting the desired values from over there.

2. Make Search Engine Friendly CMS Usage:
It is through CMS that all the Meta title, keyword and description for all the pages and categories of the portal are included, makes sure to make those compliant with the Google’s guideline. Keep the character limit of Meta elements industry standard for avoiding getting penalized.


3. User-Friendly Navigation:
Cluttered navigation often leads to higher bounce rate and directly effects SEO effort. Make sure to plan a user-friendly navigation with proper UI as this is the part from where user starts their journey. Make sure that you do not give all your pages link in home page navigation as that is considered spam. Plan a navigation which has all those parts which is most important to you from the perspective of business.

4. Optimize Page Loading Speed ;
One needs to have a site with blistering loading speed in general below 4 secs. One can set the loading time of page from the admin panel and set it to less than 100 milliseconds.

5. Create and Submit Sitemap:
Sitemap is a must for any website irrespective of its genre and its must for ecommerce portal with so many pages. While crawling your site Google looks for sitemap as this makes its work easy. In a single page its gets the link of all pages associated with the portal and so creates an index of your website, in absence of it many pages are missed and only after several crawl sessions those get included. Also sitemap lets both user and Google understand what the site is all about.

6. Robots.txt Availability:
Have robots.txt in your portal as that ensures which URLs of your site you wish to come in SERP. You can control your desired version of SERP view meant for your site through this, so use it wisely.

7. Image Optimization:
Make sure to utilize image attributes by adding tags in every product image. This not just gives a unique definition of each image to Google, but also adds value to the SEO initiative.

8. Remove Duplicate Contents:
If you are having the issues of duplicate URLs in your portal go to system in backend of the portal for solving the issue. Under there you will find configuration>catalogue>search engine optimization , one inside this segment set the option  “Use Categories Path for Product URLs” to “No”.

9. 301 Redirect:
Make sure that your site has 301 redirection done, and has a fixed desired web URL version. This will not make Google treat your several versions of portal like http://www.xyz.com/ or http://xyz.com/ as mirror sites. Make use of Canonical URL’s for Magento Module for making this happen if you are not comfortable with webmaster tool.

10. Activate Caching.
For making the most of this feature go to System>cache Management and activate the caching features.

How to Optimize Magento eCommerce Website for Search Engines

SEO paves the way
93% of all online experiences start with a search engine browsing.  This data exhibits a very strong side of the ecommerce business and that is it will always remain search engine dependent and hence should be always meant for that. Another startling fact states that almost 75% of total new surfers do not go to the second page of any SERP; this tells about a basic human nature that we only trust those who are in the first row and never give a second look to runner ups. Who knows the name of the second person landing on moon? Who can remember the second person scaling the heights of Mount Everest? No one to be true knows or even wants to know their name. All that matters in ecommerce fight of global domination is first page ranking in Google SERP for the desired keyword and that can only be attained through planned SEO strategy.

Most of the recent analysts are suggesting for going ahead with paid ways of promoting your site, but statistics suggest that 70-80% of user ignore paid ads and prefer to go ahead with organic results. Why so you might ask? The answer is these are 2014 users and they know organic results are the best filtered ones for them and not just any name who have run a paid campaign in Google. This brings ahead the importance of proper SEO Optimization implementation in any ecommerce portal and especially Magento as most of the portals are based on this platform as it is the highest chosen one in this regards.

Why you need to optimize your Magento ecommerce store for Search Engines?

There is a huge competition among online portals with high traffic as most of them from a same niche sell same or almost similar line of products. This actually makes it really tough to gain the presence in search engine. To add with this search engine algorithms are really tricky to understand and little information about their likes and dislikes can be found openly in the internet. Thus, without right employment of organic SEO your store will be just a fanciful stop with no user whatsoever. The best possible solution is to consult with a professional in this regards as all the decisions will directly effect in your revenue generation.

Where to Employ SEO in your Magento Store

Magento has in-built panel for the implementation of various SEO options and a quick view of all those parts might help you are lot. Here they are:

1. Make your URLs clean and clear: 
 

The URL structure has to be search engine friendly and that can be controlled under Magento admin panel through customization.

Go to: System => Configuration => Web => Search Engines Optimization.

• Enter "URL Options" menu, set "No" for "Add Store Code to URLS" to avoid store codes being added to your URLs.

• Enter "Search Engine Optimization" menu, set "Yes" for "Server URL Rewrites" to remove "index.php" from your URLs.

2. Let Search Engine Crawl Your Portal: Unless and until your portal is crawled by search engine all your SEO efforts have not return. For doing thisClick through 

System => Configuration => Design => HTML Heads, and then change the "Default Robots" setting to "INDEX, FOLLOW".

3. Remove Duplicate Contents: Make sure that there are no duplicate content or values in the portal as Google hates it. 
 

Remove duplicate URLs by, clicking through System => Configuration => Catalog => Search Engine Optimization and set "No" for "Use Categories Path for Product URLs".

There are many more points to be taken care of, but primarily these can be considered as the ones of the highest priority. We will continue sharing more on this area in the coming days. Stay tuned!

 

Top 5 advantages of outsourcing a Magento Website Development Project

There are numerous forum threads asking the question whether or not outsourcing a task pertaining to development of Magento ecommerce portal is a great idea - and that too especially to Indi!. Well, to begin with this, it might be stated that opinion changes on perspective, but statistic is stronger than vacant words. Development in an on-site or offshore always requires a technically sound team with cost-effective solutions and knowledge. And demographic barrier hardly plays any role in that. While pondering over these topics, some of the crucial things which might add value to this context should be highlighted. When we talk about Magento, one thing that we all know is that 26.2% of the global ecommerce market is their playing ground. The reason behind it is quite simple: it offers the best solution at the most competitive price. Thus, while looking for making use of this platform in development of any web store, why should every not consider these two points?

Magento and India Connection:
A recent survey has shown that 1 out of 4 online business stores are built with Magento and most of the sites have been developed by companies based in India. This has prompted to heavy demand of Magento website development India, which made mass change in the outsourcing model globally. Most of the clients seek local developer as they have a feeling that having someone in front of your eye will make them deliver better. But, the truth is distance matters least only quality does. Globally there are somewhat 172 certified Magento developers. Out of them 22 are from India whereas 77 are from US, instead of that people prefer India, why? The basic reason is the cost gets cut down to almost one-fifth and this leads to priority of Indian Magento developers.

Benefits of Outsourcing MagentoEcommerce Projects:
Let me share with you five top reason why even after so many debates in the forums people tend to choose the Indian development industry when it comes to creating ecommerce portal based on Magento.

1. For boosting team’s effort with specialist: In most of the cases while developing any ecommerce portal in Magento the need to specific skill set is required in some of the critical stages. Choosing developers from your region might add to the project cost. You can hire a remote developer on hourly or contractual basis for completing the portal and this gets best furnished by outsourcing firms.
2. Get the best blend of Cost and Quality: The third world nations have robust service offering infrastructure. This can be done due to their huge talent pool addition on yearly basis. India is a nation where on an average 8 lakh students pass engineering each year and most of them come join the web industry. With such an abundance of talent the price is much cheaper and so at the cost of one Magento developer you get atlest there Senior Magento developer when contacting outsourcing service offering firm.
3. Flexibility of time: Time is never a problem with any outsourcing company, they always make sure to offer you a team that work on your comfortable time slot so that you can stay in the whole loop of project development adding value to the whole episode.
4. Various Hiring Type: For giving maximum flexibility clients are offered with array of options while hiring offshore developers for their project. The hiring can be done for full-time, part-time or even hourly basis based on the need of the client.
5. Certified: Having certified developers is always added advantage and that too at one fifth of the price of hiring a certified developer in your part of the world is a boon. With 22 plus certified developer and highest number of Senior Megento developers in the world India is sure to remain the hotspot of ecommerce innovation.

Hope the above elaboration comes handy making an informed decision! 

Magento Custom Development Checklist: What is that your developer must have?

Augmenting User Experience Through Effective Magento Development

Magento poses as one of the most interactive and user centric eCommerce mediums available out there. It takes a lot of efforts to develop a Magento store in tandem to the user specifications. An effective experience on the online space can create good customer base and enhance customer loyalty as well. A wrong one on the other had can damage the online viability of the Magento web-store altogether.

For small e-merchants specially, the need for augmented user experience is more prominent. Having a clear objective for the site development is a must in this regard. One can literally make use of some development checklists to make sure that the on-site experience of the consumers is suited to the merchant’s needs.

Magento Custom Development - Site Experience Checklist

Basics like creating an effective interface is a must for any eCommerce verticals. Providing the customers with revamped means of interacting with the site gives the consumers a refreshing experience. The basic parameters that one should incorporate in their development cycle are:

Conducting mock transactions: This is effectively for testing the efficiency of the whole online transaction process. This way, one can rid the web-stores from any performance glitches effectively.

Augmenting Navigation: Navigation controls are primary to the whole user experience of a site. Testing the essential links and checking whether they are working properly is a key performance check for developers. Creating a layered and more robust navigational pattern is a must in this regard. Following a breadcrumb structure helps the consumers to find their specific products with ease.

Consistency of Color Scheme: Though the developers don’t really engage in designing aspect, yet keeping a uniform consistency in the color schemes and brand identity materials are a must. Development of customer communication verticals should also follow the same parameter.

Promotion Positioning: Magento eCommerce gives the merchants the ability to provide promotional offers. It is important to position the promotions in ways which are visually engaging and easy to comprehend.

Running SEO Maintenance: SEO forms an integral part of the online promotion of Magento store. Optimizing the keywords, meta-tags/ descriptions and page titles are effective in garnering organic traffic.

Streamlining Checkouts: A common understanding goes that the fewer steps there are in the checkout, the easier it is for the consumers. Developers can enable one-page checkouts or take help of third party extensions like PayPal Express Checkouts.

Apart from these effective techniques one can also take into purview consumer friendly features like easy/optional registration, social plugins and more for optimizing the user experience of Magento webstore. 

How to Optimize Your Magento E-Commerce Site in Tune to the Latest in SEO

Magento in eCommerce and the World of Opportunities: Tips to Get your Website in Tune to SEO Norms

In eCommerce visibility counts bid as a parameter and that is effectively what the Commerce platforms work towards. SEO friendliness is a fact that all the major eCommerce platforms work towards to augments the consumer’s brand/service visibility. It is of common knowledge that Magento is one of the most SEO friendly mediums out there. Ranking the e-store in a favorable position is possible by augmenting the features that Magento presents. But you should know, to make the best use of the possibilities.

Magento’s SEO-friendliness is unquestionable. This discourse deals with providing insights on the tips and tricks to enhanced SEO-friendliness of the popular eCommerce development vertical. Those are:

Tweaking the URLs: Magento provides options for tweaking the URLs to make them more search engine friendly. To tweak the same one need to go to the “Search Engine Optimization (SEO)” field and manually set the Server URL rewrites option to positive. This effectively will remove the index.php from the URL. Making them more search engine friendly in the process. 

 

Augmenting the HTML heads: To help search engines index the e-stores better, one can use this technique. For this one has to go to System > Configuration > Design > HTML Heads first. Thereafter they can change the defaults robot to “INDEX, FOLLOW” in the settings.

Title and Descriptions: By error people can leave the default title and description blank during creating the pages. This results in blank information which is harder to index by search engines. It is imperative to fill in these boxes with custom and product oriented texts to optimize the product pages in the search engines.

Creating “robot.txt”: Doing this will help the search engines to index the pages better and in tandem with the URLs that one wants to appear with.

Getting rid of URL Duplication: URL duplication plays massacre to the ambitions of the e-stores. T avoid this from happening people can make use of a simple technique. Under the SEO head, one can set the “NO” command under “Use Categories Path for Product URLs”. 

 

Apart from these effective optimization techniques, there are some other simple tricks like optimizing the Meta tags individually. Using category images and writing descriptions targeting each of the segments independently also help an e-store to driving in traffic from the search engines. Using easily comprehensible image names are also among the subtle techniques to make the products more search-friendly. 

 

It is imperative to say that using these simple, yet effective techniques one can augment the online exposure of his/her Magento e-stores in real time. In simple words, SEO is easy, with Magento by the side!







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