Wednesday, February 26, 2014

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!



 


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