When it comes to choosing a content management system for an online retail store, experienced e-commerce developers, without any doubt, would recommend Magento. Two key reasons to recommend Magento over others are the minimum requirement of the investment and the time for customization. Because Magento is an open source CMS, the major part of the investment goes only in paying the fee developers.
Note: The Magento Commerce (On-Premises), which was previously known as Magento Enterprise Edition, is not a free and recommended only for large businesses.
Although the open-source licensing makes the development easier and affordable, however the development would only be successful if the store receives good response from customers. To launch a Magento e-commerce store and to get good response on it are things pole apart. It’s easy to hire professional Magento e-commerce developers and get implemented your store at lowest possible price, but it’s not easy to get desired traffics; no matter how much you have invested.
Both, the existing Magento store owners and the new ones, always need an ever increasing number of customers to keep surviving. Thank god we have the Search Engine Optimization to do that. The techniques of search engine optimizations can be applied even in a Magento e-commerce store; for increasing customer-traffic and ultimately the revenue. Here are some excellent SEO techniques for Magento based e-commerce store.
Content is still the King, also for an ecommerce website.
The whole web depends on the content. We have text, images, and video as the key formats to provide content to the audience. Every page of a website should include sufficient content so that search engine can give it proper weight and enlist it to search engine results.
Content should properly define a product, from its functions to feature, to size/dimensions, to weight, to everything that customers need to know before they buy a product.
Make sure your page has been given more stressed on text content in comparison to images and videos. It’s why because images and videos are just the dead medium carrying information. Search engines cannot read them. There is nothing such intelligent technology has been invented so far which can discover each and every detail carried by an image or video. So if search engines cannot read an image or video, they cannot put it into the search results.
The details for images and videos are added to them through text content which all search engines can understand and then deliver as per the queries created by the audience.
Pictures and video showing up products should tell about themselves to Search Engine.
As I mentioned above, no search engine can make a difference in the picture of a drum and cup if they look same in the pattern. In fact, search engine cannot even read what a picture is all about. This information to search engine is provided with text and, your responsibility is to provide every image and video with sufficient text details.
The naming of every image should be done with a little care as search engines easily read the name and metadata. It applies on.PDF and .docx files too. An image displaying brown leather jacket named as LJ001B doesn’t make any sense to search engines. But when you name it as leather-jacket-brown, you optimize it to be compatible the way search engines read a web page. You can make image information richer by adding titles, good description and ALT tag when you add it to a web page.
Don’t use duplicate content
Often time, e-commerce websites have hundreds of similar products, but they are different in terms of manufacturing, design, and several properties. What administrators of a website do is that for a single type of product, they use a single piece of the content. Here they do mistake because if products are displayed on different pages, even if they are used for a single purpose, a search engine will consider each of the pages as an individual page and weigh them separately from each other. Now if you have used the same content on more than one page, a search engine can penalize your website because of carrying duplicate content on multiple pages.
Use Extensions to Improve User Experience
The SEO does not end merely by adding good content and right placement of keywords to a page. Making everything on a page look better and understandable to users is also a vital part of an effective SEO strategy. Fortunately, we have a number of Magento Extensions that can help us add desired user experience to an e-commerce website. These extensions are available as both, free and paid.
Get Your Robots.txt File to Work for You
Search engines want every website to have robot.txt so that they can know how exactly you want them to enlist your website and show in the search results. You can access the Robot.txt in your Magento store in this way
- Go into ‘System’
- Click on ‘Configuration’
- Click on ‘Design’
- Click into ‘HTML Heads’
Find the ‘Default Robots’ setting and change it to “INDEX, FOLLOW”
This action will allow search engines to index your website.
Fill Out the Meta Fields
The Magento CSM provides you the best of the ways to create Meta titles and descriptions from the back-end. In a non-Magento web page, it’s normally done by opening the source of the page in a text editor and then putting the required metals in the header. Magento provides an easier way to put meta tags just by going into configuration page/design / HTML head. It allows changing the titles and descriptions according to your products. Don’t miss to add the related keywords as well.
Generate a Google Sitemap
Google needs an XML sitemap for how many pages does websites have. Magento lets you do that quite easily just from back-end. To make a Google XML sitemap, go into configuration, then access Google Sitemap settings and there, change your configuration to enable sitemap generation.
Conclusion
Magento is one of the easiest content management systems available for e-commerce businesses. The free version comes with features and functions which are sufficient for small-medium online retail stores. But whatever the size of a store is, it needs customers to continuously stay in the market. Here SEO comes as the handiest techniques helping Magento based online store owners to increase customer traffic. Apply the tips mentioned in this post and experience positive changes.
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