Best SEO Practices for Magento eCommerce Websites

1. Few Essential SEO Tips
for Magento
eCommerce Website
There have been questions about SEO friendliness of
Magento. However as it evolved over the years,
Magento has become one of the most SEO friendly
eCommerce platforms. To capitalize out of the box SEO
features of Magento and to increase sales
performance, there are few minor tweaks that should be
made so search engine won’t hold a resentment
against you.
In this presentation we have complied some of the best
tips to help your Magento SEO.

2. #1. Set Your Preferred Domain
Don’t let the WWW and no-WWW version of your magento eCommerce website
compete for rankings or create canonical issue since you can easily fix this issues
easily.
Go to “Secure” and “Unsecure” Base URL which is located in the
core_config_datatable in phpMyAdmin to set this preference within Magento
and then enforce it by using two ways given below:
• Enforce a 301 redirect to a preferred version with a mod_rewrite in your
.htaccess file
• Opt your preferred version in Google Webmaster Tool

3. #2. Enable Server URL Rewrites & Disable Store Codes in URLS
You can consider this step as one of the simplest methods to get more control
over URL of your website. Since search engines evaluate the URLs when
determining the ranking and relevance (target keyword in URL and dynamic
character strings etc), you need to make sure that you have taken care to keep
such things short, simple and clean.
To perform this, go to System -> Configuration -> Web -> Search Engine
Optimization and under “Use Web Server Rewrites” simply check the “Yes”. This
ensures that the index.php no more will display at the end and URL is clearly
readable for Search Engine Crawlers.

4. #3. Use Tiered XML Sitemaps
You may already be using XML sitemap but you might not know about the
“sitemap of sitemaps”, this actually breaks out the categories into more bite-sized
chunks for a search robots to index the pages easily. This reduces the long,
awkward length of sitemap that can cause webpages listed at the bottom of
sitemap to be ignored.
Break out your sitemap for each large section, then list the URL’s of the other
sitemaps in a primary sitemap.
Now in your admin panel, go to Catalog -> Google Sitemap -> Add Sitemap and
add you primary sitemap and then you need to add that sitemap to your
robots.txt file. Now you can add your sitemap in Google Webmaster Tool.

5. #4. Disable the Category Name in the URL Path
Adding category name in the URL may reduce the messy URLS and loads of
duplicate content problems. In order to maintain control and avoid such issues,
go to System -> Configuration -> Catalog -> Search Engine Optimization and
change the “Use categories path for product URLs” to “No”.

6. #5. Eliminate Empty Robot Metas
Magento has one weird tendency to show the no-set meta robots tags given
below:
<meta name=”robots” content=”*” />
This can be a problem for search engines so it is advisable to remove them from
your code. There are pretty good extensions ready to use available that can
handle this issues quite nicely.

7. #6. Move JavaScript and CSS files into external file instead of Templates
Messy templates don’t help in improving your Magento SEO. By moving
JavaScript and CSS files into external files, you can make sure that the users
cache them on their first load and prevent search engines from having to
download them over and over again. Make note that, here you need to
combine these files into concentrated external file instead of having dozens of
external ones.
Reducing number of files to be downloaded can hugely improve the
performance of your Magento eCommerce website.
The thing here to keep in mind is stylesheets. Magento doesn’t handle these,
combining stylesheets into just a single new one to keep the things buzzing
quickly.

8. #7. Don’t Overlook the Image Optimization, Unique Title & Description
In many cases due to tight deadlines optmizing image sizes , adding titles and
descriptions are likely to be overlooked . Make sure that you take time out to
optimize each product image for both; search engines and the visually impaired.
You can give image a product name instead of a generic filename such as
image10.jpg. Search engines use the file name when determining the image
rankings.
Magento provides you a full access to give a unique meta title and description –
so use it efficiently for SEO benefits.
Keep unique title and description for each product and category pages.

9. #8. Build for Users
We have talked lot about technical terms, but there is one more thing which you
need to keep on top in your chart and that is your site should be made in a way
that users can easily access all the features. Search Engines dislike poor content
quality, confusing navigation, messy website structure and slow speed. These are
few essential things you should keep in mind for SEO during Magento
eCommerce website development.
Tweak your technical elements but make sure that your visitors have good
experience of browsing your website which ideally should be informative, clear
and unique content, interactive yet very easy to use, quick – particularly check
out, no bugs, optimized yet attractive product images, no miscommunication
with very clear instruction about your products, services and processes, mobile
friendly website structure (responsive), adding videos and few other things can
result in amazing conversions.

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