The best platform for building any e-commerce online store is Magento. To make your online store visible to your customers or you can say targeted customers, a well defined SEO process is needed. Let’s discuss about some useful, really useful and effective SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tips to make your online store a big and successful business for you !!
1. Remove index.php from your URLs to make your products URLs more Search Engine Friendly. After installing the latest version of Magento, be sure to set the Server URL Rewrites option to Yes to remove index.php from your URLs. Server URL rewrite option can be found under Search Engine Optimization menu.
2. In URL Options menu under System => Configuration => Web => Search Engines Optimization set “No” for Add Store Code to URLS. This will avoids store codes being added to your page URL and product URLs.
3. Submit your website sitemap to Google and make sure to set robots file setting to INDEX and FOLLOW to ensure fast and proper crawling of your webpages. In Magento you can accomplish this by changing the Default Robots setting to INDEX,FOLLOW under System => Configuration => Design => HTML Heads.
4. Don’t forget to add well-defined and descriptive Meta title and Meta Description for your webpages. Do not use same meta-information in all pages!. This will cause duplicate. Try to add Meta Title, Keywords and Description that gives an idea about your product and services to Google crawler.
In your Magento store set the title and metadata on a page to page basis, go to individual categories and product pages in the catalog section of Admin Panel.
5. Try to give your images file name a keyword rich and generic file name. Suppose you manage an online store for shoes. Then instead of giving your image this name “img_6765886.jpeg”, try to include keyword in it like “puma-shoes.jpeg”, addidas-shoes.jpeg”. You can see the Image SEO article here
6. One best feature of Magento is that it gives you the facility of its own Google XML sitemap generator to help you generate and submit an XML sitemap to Google using Google Webmaster Tools. To Generate sitemap for your online store goto System => Configuration => Google Sitemap.
7. Enable “Google Analytics” by going to this path: System => Configuration => Google API.
8. Make your Magento store run faster by enabling caching. For this go to System => Cache Management and enable all caching features.
9. Avoid duplicate content and duplicate URL issues in your website. Always try to follow one URL structure through the whole site. (See this article for details)
10. Ensure that there is no coding error while designing web page. Validate Your Code using W3C validator.
Want to discover more, view the full details about How to SEO on Magento?
