Almost 26% of the websites are powered by Magento the most dominating platform all across the world. That make this platform most useable platform thus giving the Magento Developers more chances to work on it. The use of this platform attracts more and more entrepreneurs to invest in having a business on it. What a great platform!. But! Not to hurry, just having an eCommerce store on Magento is not all, the most important thing that has to be done is to optimize your Magento store to increase your Magento store sale with SEO.
To SEO-friendly Magento store for the customers to reach your store and to keep your store on top ranking of a search engine you need to have some Magento SEO tips and some Magento SEO best practices. Nah! Don’t worry… Magento search engine optimization is not a difficult task to do, just follow these advices for optimize your Magento store and increase your Magento store sale. With these tips and avoid common mistakes in Magento SEO that many Magento developers make that cost the store to suffer. I am all here to save your time and tell you all the SEO tips for Magento store.
You must be thinking how to optimize Magento store, so to give you an idea all you need to have, are some Magento SEO tools. You need to install best Magento SEO extensions. Without any further ado lets have a look on some common SEO mistakes in Magento that developers make often and their solutions. lets start! shall we?
Not fixing URL Rewrites at All
First things first the main and the most common SEO mistakes in Magento and the best advice for Magento better SEO optimize your Magento store. Rewriting the URLs make them user-friendly for the users and for the search engines and crawlers as well. To do the settings all you have to do is go to your admin panel and do the following steps:
- Change the value of “Add Store Code to URLs” under the option “URL Option” to “No”.
- Navigate to System -> Configuration –> Catalog –> Search Engine Optimization –> Use web server and then turn on the Web Server Rewrites.
- Set your “Auto-redirect to Base URL” option as yes and redirect all your traffic to the same base URL automatically.
Not Creating Google Sitemap and Not refreshing it at regular intervals
Ongoing further in Magento SEO guide, the most common SEO mistakes in Magento that developers make is that they do not create Google sitemap, or if they do they do not refresh it at regular intervals. What is Google Sitemap? many fresh developers don’t have idea about it, for them I am elaborating if but if you know about it there you go! you are a champ already! In Magento, the sitemaps refer to “Google Sitemaps” and yes! they support Yahoo and Bing as well. before going live many developers forgets to delete the product that they made for the testing purpose in the development phase. The suggested solution is:
- The first thing that you have to do is add a sitemap by creating it from the sitemap directory in the web root, but make sure to give it writable permissions.
- If you are using the hosted version of Magento i.e Magento Go- just navigate to System – configuration – Catalog – Google Sitemap and start to create one for your site.
- About that refreshing problem, the solution is that turn on the option to refresh the sitemap automatically. Configure it in System – Configuration – Catalog- Google Sitemap. Or simply download must have Magento SEO extensions like Magento Extended Sitemap Extension and Aschroder.com Sitemap Submit just to solve the problem.
Issues Related to Layered Navigation
The common SEO mistake in Magento that many experienced Magento Developer make is that they ignore the importance of the layered navigation. The customer loves a store that is much faster and smoother to surf, give the customer to option so that they can search the product according to the filters like size, color, category or options. Providing disadvantage of the problem of the same content can be a problematic thing.
But! before you get panic, there is the solution for this problem. Control your navigation being indexed by Google. To achieve it use cookies or sending fast Ajax Requests. If you use Ajax it is hard to and to do it you have to get the experience of Magento developing, doing so it can filter the products appending anything to URLs and ending up at the original page only. Or purchase and integrate a Premium Extension from must have Magento SEO extensions – Layered Navigation Pro directly from Magento Ecommerce extensions library.
Not Changing the Default Keywords
I have seen many people doing one common SEO mistake in Magento that they do not change the default keywords. Although google and other search engines do not use the keyword meta tag just because of the spamming issues, so the real point here is to focus on the high-quality logical phrase that makes the best keywords and that makes the content unique rather than focusing on the keywords.
The solution is that while choosing the keywords use keyword tools. If you haven’t have decided the keywords for every product page CMS page and category page then leaving Default keywords field blank. To insert Default keywords navigate System – Configuration – Design – HTML head – Default Keywords, put your keywords here after analyzing them well and if you haven’t than leave it blank for a while.
Not Optimizing Title Tags Correctly
One of the common SEO mistakes in Magento that developers make is that they don’t optimize the title tags correctly that totally ruin Magento SEO friendly store to solve it they need Magento SEO optimization of title tags. Many SEO folks do perform the optimization of title tags but they do not do it the right way! So I am here to tell you the common mistake that many SEO people do so that you can avoid that. They make their Homepage title as “Home” that doesn’t make any sense rather than that make title that truly represent your business. As a merchant and the store owner, if you hired a good SEO expert, you will not see these type of blunders most probably.
The advice for Magento better SEO is not to take the risk with the traffic on your site and make your store optimized so that it can get ranked on a search engine in top searches. The other mistakes that Magento SEO optimizers make are Making long nonsense titles without including keywords, doing title duplicity using similar title tags on multiple pages, Not changing the default Homepage and lastly Not changing the alt title text on Images and especially on the Logo.
Optimize Magento store with these tips. Just navigate to the admin area, System – Configuration – Design – HTML Head and there enter a new title in the “Default Title” field. During the creation of title make sure that you use keywords in that make the title unique, unlike and relevant to you store dealings. Make sure that the do not over limit your title it should be in between 60 to 160 characters. Make sure to change the alt text for your logo with the alt test for all the products images as well to do Magento SEO optimization. The good news is that the Magento can do it for you all you have to do is to Go to System – Configuration – Design, click on Header tab.
Here make sure to change the logo source to your respective filename or path also make sure to alter the alt text of your logo. Use the keywords in your alt texts for them to be more search engine friendly. These are some Magento SEO tips that can make SEO-friendly Magento store all you have to do is adopt Magento SEO best practices and implement them well.
Not Handling Canonicalization
Google is providing the best way to handle Canonicalization at Webmasters Tools Support Page, despite that fact, many SE optimizers still make this mistake and they do not handle Canonicalization which is one of the common mistakes in Magento SEO. To deal with the problem SEO tips for Magento store and to increase your Magento store sale with SEO, just Go to System – Configuration – Catalog – Search Engine Optimization and do some configuration that is mentioned below at the last.
- Set Canonical Link meta Tag For Categories Field to “Yes”
- Set Canonical Link Meta Tag for Products Field to “Yes”
Other than handling the canonicalization it will also make sure that your site don’t have similar content if you want to same product in multiple categories.
Not Taking Care of Duplicate URLs
What does it mean? That means having repeated URL in the web pages that cost your site performance and SEO. Also again another and big blunder for e-commerce search engine optimization. The Magento SEO best practices? solve this solution by o to System – Configuration – Catalog – Search Engine Optimization save the value “No” to the field “Use Categories Path for Product URLs”.
While Going Live Blocking Indexation of Website
If you don’t want that your site loses all worth, don’t make this mistake happen and this is not a good practice for Magento search engine optimization. Not only an individual Magento developer makes this mistake I have seen many companies making this mistake and not turning on the indexation of the site before they make the site live on a server on the internet from development phase. The best advice for Magento for better SEO is that never ever forget to turn “ON” the meta robots through “index, follow” before launching the website.
In order to do this all you have to do is go to your admin panel and do the following steps. System – Configuration – General – Design – HTML Head – Default robots “INDEX, FOLLOW”. Another way to do is alter your code in the robots.txt file directly. But! don’t get too nasty, only perform this step when you are going on the live stage of your site never do this at the development stage. Before launching when you test your site on the testing server set it as “NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW”.
Conclusion
You have seen all the must have Magento SEO extensions to optimize your Magento store and increase your Magento store sale with SEO. Use the Magento SEO tips and Magento SEO best practices to make your site go on high ranking. Make sure never ever do these type of mistakes that many SEO optimizers make while Magento SEO optimization.
Still, if you do have any question? Let me know and you will get your solution for sure.
