Magento eCommerce is quickly becoming one of the more popular eCommerce platforms for businesses of all sizes. Launched in March of 2008, this platform seems to have it all—catalog management, mobile commerce, analytics and reporting, checkout, etc.—and offers both a free version as well as a paid enterprise-level version. However, there is one thing that Magento eCommerce doesn’t get right: SEO.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important aspects of Internet marketing. Fortunately, Magento eCommerce isn’t a lost cause. Although it may not be search-engine-ready right away, there are a few things a company owner can do to help get it ready.
Getting Magento eCommerce Ready for SEO
- Rewrite the Default URL.
You should always look at your URL configuration and make sure it is ready to go for the search engine bots. Long URLs, or URLs in their dynamic forms, can be confusing to search engines and then cause them to miss information that a URL can offer. Fixing a URL configuration is known as “rewriting” the URL, and this can often be completed with a variety of tools. With the Magento platform, it’s as easy as clicking the System section à Configuration panel à Web option à and setting the feature to “Yes.”
You may also want to turn off your Store ID code additions so they are not included in your URL. You can find this option in the web configuration setting,
Finally, it’s a good idea to take advantage of 301 redirects to make sure that whether your visitors type in the domain with a “www” and used without the “www” they are taken to the same place. To do this, you must access your site’s .htaccess file and set up rewrites so that search engines know how to index your URLs. You can learn more about the .htaccess file here.
- Customize aspects of all the different pages for SEO.
As with all things SEO, the content on the magneto platform needs to be optimized for search engines. This means that you should focus on a few specific keywords and make sure that your meta tags, title of your pages, and URL are all optimized for that keyword. You can do this by going to the backend of your site and going from Catalog à the Manage categories section. You will also want to make sure that your images are optimized by using your keywords in the titles of your images. You can find this by going from Images à to Product information.
- Help speed up your site.
Having a site that loads and works quickly is becoming more and more important in the eyes of Google, but it’s also important if you want to keep your users engaged and decrease frustration. The Magento platform is not known for its speed, but fortunately there are a few things you can do to help speed up the system. First, go to the cache management section and enable all of the caching choices. Next, consider whether or not your web host can handle the volume Magento offers. Finally, combine all of your CSS files into a single page to help improve speed.
Also, when you initially set up your site, you should research your keywords and build categories based on good keywords. Your main category names will help Google determine which keywords you want to be relevant for. So obviously, make sure they are good keywords.
Use the Google Adwords keyword tool to see the traffic levels for different keywords. You should build categories that obviously make sense for navigation purposes, but check the traffic levels for different keywords. You might find that simply having a slightly different name for a category or splitting a main category into 2 might be beneficial when it comes to ranking.
Good keywords are not always the keywords with the most traffic. If your site is new, don’t try to target keywords that have a lot of traffic. Find keywords that are in the middle as far as traffic. Those will be the best keywords to go after at first.
GREAT point. I think many new websites zero in on those huge keywords, and it’s going to be a long uphill battle to really rank. Creating a website around keywords is huge, but it is just as important to worry about navigation and what makes sense (as you said). Thanks for reading!