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.
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.
