How to Get Magento SEO Right When Setting Up Your E-Commerce Store

E-Commerce Store

Magento, a very popular e-commerce platform built on open source technology, provides e-commerce businesses with a shopping cart system that is not only flexible but permits extensive control of the appearance, functionality, and content of the online store. Magento is completely scalable and allows a rudimentary online business to expand to one with tens of thousands of products without requiring any change in the platform. There are quite a few aspects of the e-commerce store that need to be configured according to the requirements of the business. It is obvious that with multiple customization options, it can be a daunting process to set up the online business for Sydney SEO success. Some useful tips that can help you to your Magento-based site better optimized for SEO right from the very start:

Configure A URL Structure That Is SEO-Friendly

According to https://moz.com, URLs should be decisive as well as concise with both users and search engines being able to figure out what the web page is all about by just seeing the URL. Established SEO practices dictate that each URL present on your site should not only be unique but also easy to read by search engines and SEO-friendly. Letting Magento create the URLs for you would be a big mistake because they will simply not be optimized properly. It is far better to instead, review each URL and ensure it is short, succinct, and simple to understand. If you keep in mind that people should easily be able to type in the page URL manually to reach the page they want, the need for the URL to be simple and meaningful will be amply clear. Long and confusing URLs with arbitrary numbers or nonsensical words will be easily mistyped by people and irritate people because all they will be able to get for their efforts is an error message. The website rankings are not so much affected by the simplicity of the URLs as is the quality of the user experience.

All Category & Product Pages Should Have Titles & Meta Descriptions

Even though adding title and Meta descriptions to web pages is a universal SEO rule, it is something that many SEO practitioners forget about often. While Magento has the capability of writing the titles and descriptions automatically for you, it is a valuable chance missed to include the important keywords and write them in a way that they stand out despite the noise by the competition. Magento will typically pull the first few sentences from a web page to create a default page description, which might not always make sense when reading in isolation and you can be pretty sure that they will not contain the keywords that are important for search engine rankings. You also need to be careful about avoiding the descriptions put out the product manufacturers as this will be merely generic information being used by many other sites. It is far better to have unique descriptions for each page that will stand out in the crowd of identical descriptions because users are more likely to visit that page.

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Optimize the Images of the Products

Regardless of whether you are using Magento or not, optimizing images can work wonders for SEO because search engines, as advanced as they are, still cannot interpret the meaning of images. It is very easy to miss out the opportunity of being able to add additional keywords by not giving them specific alt tags that can help them to be discovered by Google. As with URLs, the alt tags should ideally be descriptively short, easy to read, and clear because ultimately the file name will become a part of the URL. Paying attention to the image size is important as very large images will tend to load slowly and lead to frustrated users. According to https://searchengineland.com, using .jpeg images is preferable to .png images as they offer better compression.

Ensure You Use the H2 and H3 Tags

When structuring a web page, it is important to differentiate between the H1, H2, and H3 tags and establish their hierarchy. The page titles need to have the H1 tag while other headings and subheadings can use the H2 and H3 tags. If the three different tags are not used correctly, search engines tend to get confused and are not able to index the pages correctly thus affecting your overall rank. By default, Magento makes all page titles H1, however, this is not suited for best SEO as H1 tags should ideally be only used to identify category title and product names. You should not only maintain the correct tag hierarchy but also ensure that you insert the most relevant keywords in the tags so that everyone, including Google, knows what the images are all about, however, stay away from keyword stuffing to avoid being penalized.

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Make Your Site Faster

A common complaint with Magento users is that the platform behaves sluggishly and pages take too long to load. This can be costly from both the point of lost sales opportunities and rankings as most people are unwilling to be patient and wait for the pages to load. According to https://bsscommerce.com, most users tend to abandon a web page if the page takes more than three seconds to load. A very easy way of speed optimization is by enabling caching so that a version of the website is stored on the user’s computer and does not entail the time it would have taken if the site were to have loaded from scratch. Merging JavaScript and CSS files is also a good technique for speeding up the loading; however, while Magento combines most JavaScript files automatically into one download, it does not do the same for CSS files. Merging of these files, increase your page speed significantly.

Conclusion

There are a lot of advantages of using Magento for setting up an e-commerce platform. It allows extremely versatile content management, incorporate mobile-friendly responsive design, as well as huge scalability of supporting up to 500,000 products per site. Due to its complexity and size, Magento will deliver an optimized performance only when its mandatory hosting needs are met. Even though Magento is SEO-friendly, you can take several steps to improve your product discoverability and user experience to ensure better SERPs and conversions.