Basic SEO checklist for Magento

  • By Indian Magento Experts 19 April, 2016 0 Comments

    SEO is very important aspect in Magento Store. Efforts are to continuously improve the SEO. The Google platform and other search engines like Yahoo,Binge are designed to be one page search engine friendly by design. You do not have to do much as lone as you maintain the proper rules. Some of the common missteps are often occurred in your website. The following points should be followed in order to eschew the mistakes.

    Content and Technical Magento SEO: In our recommendations for SEO Magento Websites, we figure out in two ways -Content and Technical. Lets review content first.

    Content Magento SEO checklist: n spite of the fact that Magento is “SEO Ready”, that does not mean that you just copy-paste standard text and relaxing yourself. In order to have maximum mileage that provides by this platform, at the same time you have to examine that how well the following parameters are evaluated.

    • Full page Title: Descriptive Page titles do have clear visibility to the targeted traffic. This along with the selective keywords but at the same time the keywords do not over doing it. But the arrangements ought to be such that those keywords match possible search combination. To put it another way, keep the most important keywords in place that should not exceed 70 characters.
    • Focused Meta Description: Just like Page Title, Meta Description exhibits in search results. It is restricted to 160 characters or less with 3 or 4 of pages top keywords while extending further.
    • Meta Keyword Tags: Despite the fact that Meta keyword is mostly ignored by search engine,Meta Keyword is also used to augment SEO. Since it is a suitable place to keep common product misspelling in the text containing no more 200 characters is indexed by search engine, it is never displayed by the users.
    • Unique and focused keywords in body Text: There is a different way customers search products the way they want. Generally you ought to have 300 words of texts per page to include the most common ones. Apart from using only model numbers and brand names, you may wax eloquence in regard of benefits for ideal customers. You can also mentioned product description and subheading for boosting of SEO.
    • Labeled Images: Images having comprehensive texts are important for ranking in the search engines. By default Magento uses product names for images. You can customize tags to be more specific.
    • Blogging: It is quite natural that by selling a specific product and tete-a-tete with customers instill dollop of knowledge and gained expertise in that particular field. Timely answering the question that put forth by the potential customers are not only building your store credibility but also driving new Organic Search traffic. Magento blog plugin is available and once installed you may write 1 post with 500-1000 words weekly.
    • Off-Page Magento SEO: In order to increase your traffic you need to have business account on social network to target your audience. This helps from word-of-mouth at the time of making promotional announcements and special offer for people who connect with you and it is worth for your relevant keywords.

    Technical Magento SEO checklist: It has been observed that frequent issues arise due to overlooked settings and mistakes on account of complex store architecture. The mistakes are not so palpably until gets noticed.

    Set the homepage title: You can set your home page title with the name of your brand. This is because Magento CMS homepage title is “Home”.

    Set Logo title: Your logo should have your brand name . You should refrain from giving “Magento Commerce” as your website logo title.

    Don’t name “Default description” Field: Do not change The HTML Head default description field. Avoid using duplicate description on your store as it is not meant for your given URL.

    Unique Product and Category Pages: It may so happen that products that appear more than one category by default in Magento,Magento duplicates its description in the category. It has direct negative effect to SEO. To stop this from being duplicated, go to Configuration > Catalog > Search Engine Optimization and change the “Use Categories Path for URLs” setting from “YES” to “NO” and enable the two “Canonical Link Meta Tag”.

    Remove codes from from URLS: Remove codes from from URLS :There is a option in Magento,of course by default,stores identifier store codes to URL. It may be helpful to owners but it plays havoc in regard of customers. Go to Configuration > Web > Search Engine Optimization and set the “Add Store Codes to URLs” option from “YES” to “NO”.

    Set Layered Navigation Property: Say for example that you are opting for layered Navigation. In that case you have to ensure that your Magento store set up does not mean to direct filtered results to the same category hyperlink for different results. This can be understood better by giving an example in the following : Suppose you are having an apparel store which has a category for women with a subcategory for Bags whereas filters for styles and colors would be automatically obvious. Talking about URL for a filter, it should be accompanied with a “?” symbol i.e. This symbol separates the filtered result but at the same time keep the category intact.

    Build the site map with care: The ideal page should be such that within three clicks away from Home. It will be better to check your sitemap.xml before submitting it for indexing lest it does not contain any test or sample pages thereof.

    Make an XML Sitemap: An XML sitemap is generally used by search engines to craw your content. Navigate to Catalog > Google Sitemap and either define the pages manually or generate them automatically.

    Set “Index, Follow” and remove Robots.Txt disallow: Understandably when your website in live, the developer ought not to forget to change the “noindex, nofollow” that helps web crawlers from indexing your website. Ensure it by going through to the System > Configuration > General > Design > HTML Head and setting Default Robots to “INDEX, FOLLOW”.

    Connect Goggle Analytics: As soon as you set up your Goggle store, you long to hava a look to track how successful you are. By using Goggle Analytics, it will help you reveal the source of customers to your store and what they do once they are there. Moreover it depicts which search keyword is associated with your store. If you are contemplating of not using Goggle Analytics for the time being. keep it a provision so that you can track the progress of SEO.

    Magento SEO Summary: You may prudently think about properly setting up SEO .This is one of the cheapest method to increase your traffic and inflate your revenue. Display in the first page of Goggle is not a mean task unless you create quality content and proper technical setup. Wisely make the investment in your store long term success.