Founded in the United States in 2008, Magento is essentially a PHP-based website platform that specialized in e-commerce websites. Ecommerce websites that use Magento have access to hundreds of unique widgets and features that help them customize the experience of their customers and sell their products efficiently. Since it was built using open source technology, it gives its users sufficient control over choosing the functionality and controlling the overall aesthetic of their online store without compromising the storefront or checkout processes.
Magento is suitable for all types of e-commerce companies irrespective of the size of their customer base. Magento also provides its users with management tools, marketing tools, and search engine optimization toolkits. While it is an extremely powerful platform if as a store owner you are running on its default settings you possibly aren’t optimizing for search engines as you should. This article will act as a guide for those hoping to shape up their Magento-powered e-commerce store’s search engine optimization. If you feel you may struggle with the technical aspects of SEO, you may opt to outsource this endeavor to Magento SEO Hong Kong companies or pull your sleeves up and get to work yourself. given below are six measures that store owners can take in this regard:
In Magento storefronts, duplicate content happens due to product filtering, sorting, product variations, and due to having the same product in multiple categories. While duplication may seem like little harm, it is an issue for your website’s ranking as search engines do not understand which version of the duplication should they include or exclude from their index. Search engine crawlers also have trouble trusting the link and its authority, and get confused over which duplication should they rank for search queries. This ultimately reduces the domain authority and overall ranking of your web pages. To remove duplication, the store admin may simply visit the catalog configuration part of their admin storefront and enable canonical tags.
An XML sitemap is essentially a file that contains a list of all the pages of a website. Since it lists all URLs from your website – even those that wouldn’t otherwise be in the view of a search engine crawler – it makes the job of search engines easier by giving them page and crawl priority. Since Magento is already equipped with XML functionality, it is upon you to enable it through the admin storefront. The store owner would have to log in to admin, navigate to store settings, followed by configuration and catalog, and then arrive at XML Sitemap. Once there, the admin can look into the intricacies such as choosing category options, products, and CMS profiles and create a sitemap according to priority keeping in much search engine rankings.
To rank higher on search engines, one of the easiest measures that Magento e-commerce store owners can take is to optimize their product images used on the platform. All images must have alt-tags that do a good job of describing what is in the picture. This is an important step as search engine crawlers cannot possibly understand images, and they decipher the alt-tags to understand what an image contains. While writing alt-tags, it is crucial to keep conciseness and clarity in mind and to refrain from stuffing multiple keywords together. Images should also feature file names that describe the image rather than them being named PIC0001. To add alt-tags, the admin needs to login to their store, access the catalog, go through to the option to configure products, and reach the detail page for images to add alt-text.
Page loading speed is a crucial factor in Google’s algorithm and it plays a huge role in determining your website’s ranking. Websites with slow load speeds drive customers away and hence Google ranks them poorly due to bad user experience. To increase the loading speed of your Magento e-commerce store, you should enable all caching features by accessing the system and cache management from the admin login. One should also enable flat categories by accessing catalog settings through admin and merging JavaScript and CSS files through advanced developer configurations. While multiple other things can be done to improve loading speed, the above-mentioned are specific to Magento SEO and e-commerce stores on this platform.
Search-friendly or SEO-friendly URLs are your best friend if you are hoping to rank higher on search engines as an SEO-friendly URL structure allows search engine crawlers to easily find and pinpoint specific pages and easily index them. To make a URL search-friendly, it needs to be unique, static and optimized for URL structure. For instance, a generic format that all e-commerce stores follow is www.abc.com/category/sub-category/product. This naming convention changes according to the type and name of the products being listed. To enable search-friendly URLs, storeowners simply need to access the web configuration settings through admin and issue rewrites. You should be careful as to not add any filler words in your URLs such as the, a, an, or in.
Adding a blog section to your Magento store is crucial to your SEO endeavors, and you may simply add a blog by attaching an extension to your e-commerce store. Not only do blogs help you link internally and attain external links for domain authority, but they also allow you to promote and feature your top-selling products. You can use your blog to publish helpful information that is both relevant to your products and sought out by your target audience. By doing so, you’d essentially be creating a resource for your search engine optimization efforts, and once your blog grows you could also invite guest posts from other relevant businesses.
This article highlights the six steps that e-commerce store owners using Magento’s platform can take to improve their search engine optimization efforts. With a little understanding of Magento’s in-built capabilities and the above-given tips, storeowners can drastically improve their search engine optimization efforts and reach their intended target audience and website traffic goals.