Magento is an open-source E-commerce platform for retailers. It is one of the most popular platforms and offers many customization features. It provides complete control over features like design, content and various functionalities of the online stores.
It also offers various extensions to help you fulfil your website requirements. It is an SEO-friendly E-commerce platform and also provides mobile configuration. However, it is still essential to improve upon SEO features.If you want to create content, build links and optimise your online store then you can hire Magento SEO services.
SEO tips
- In Magento, duplicate content occurs for many reasons like product filtration, product sorting, pagination, variations of products or the same product being available in different categories. The duplicate content problem has to be solved and for this rel=’canonical’ tags can be used. The canonical tag tells the search that the page contains unique content and should be treated accordingly.
- Magento allows you to configure the robots.txt file, this file is used to tell the search engines which pages to crawl. You can use this file to block the crawling of pages like the login pages, user shopping cart, internal search pages and more.
- Magento does not support the automatic creation of HTML sitemap. You need an extension to create it. You can use an extension like Dynamic HTML sitemap for Magento 2 to create an HTML sitemap.
- An XML sitemap is used to help search engines discover all your important pages. Magento can create an XML sitemap on its own. You should create a sitemap for your website and submit it to Google Search Console.
- One of the most important Magento SEO tips is to optimise your product images. Search engines cannot read images therefore all the images should have descriptive Alt-tags. Appropriate descriptions should be used and you should not stuff keywords in them. You should use description file names for images.
- Magento uses JavaScript to load the contents of your online E-commerce store. This means Google has to first process the HTML and then load the content that uses JavaScript. For SEO you should ensure that Google can see all the contents that have to be loaded on the page. The elements that are loaded via JavaScript should be indexed.
- To rank on the top of search results your website should load quickly. If your website loads quickly the user will stay on it. You should optimise your website for speed by enabling the caching features and using flat categories and products. You can also merge your CSS and JavaScript files.
- Magento adds the ‘.html’ extension at the end of the product and category URLs. This creates lengthy URLs which are harder to read by the users. The URLs without this extension are considered to be cleaner.
- Magento helps to implement global redirects on your website. This means the store will use the ‘www’ and the ‘http’ attributes even if the users do not enter them. This will also help to improve the user experience.
- Magento includes the title tag, meta description and related product features by default. While optimising a page you can add the titles and meta description in the fields provided. They should be optimised for SEO. It provides the related products feature on the individual product pages. Adding related products on the product pages can help you to improve your SEO.
Content creation for E-commerce store
You should create content for your online store like blogs. Magento does not offer blogging functionality but you can use an extension for this. You should find relevant keywords and create content around them. Creating informative content that will be helpful for the users can help you rank higher in the search results.
Google ranks content above the product and category pages. You can create ‘how-to’ guides, guides on your products and more. Instead of trying to rank your product and category pages you can create blogs and try to rank. This will help to improve the visibility of your store.
Without the use of relevant keywords and informative content, you will not be able to rank higher.
You can add structured data to your content to help Google understand it better. There are different structured data like the product, category, breadcrumblist and more. For example, the product schema will tell Google that the information is about a particular product.
You can use link-building techniques to improve the rankings of your website. When you build relevant and high-quality inbound links to your website it improves your chances of ranking higher in the search results. It will also help to generate targetted traffic to your website.
To optimise your online store you can hire a Magento SEO agency.