Starting a new business venture can be an intimidating process, especially in such a volatile place like the Internet.
Giants of ecommerce, such as Amazon and EBay, have a substantial grasp on the market.
People with small private businesses can use these services as a platform for their products and grow said Giants even more. But where is the fun in that?
This guide is aiming to give a rough understanding of Magento and a brief overview of effective SEO methods. Starting a company or a new set of online practices? Read on.
What is Magento?
It is a ready-made open-source solution for entrepreneurs and business managers. You are free to customize the visual components and internal processes of your web-site in any specific area.
These tools are highly scalable; it is a requirement since any given business can be different, with their own sets of goals and specifications. It is regarded by small and big businesses alike.
What is SEO?
Chances are you already know what SEO stands for. It is an internet marketing strategy - a number of practices directed at improving appearances of the web-site in search results. It is tightly connected with content at your site, so you have to be very picky on what are you going to publish. Highly optimized SEO is vital for exposure of your web-site in a highly competitive market of ecommerce. Anyway, you can always get a qualified help from custom writing essays services, which will write your blog posts in the most appropriate way for SEO purposes.
How do I improve Magento search results?
Magento in its default configuration can be considered a solid choice.
Making a unique visual design for you ecommerce service is, of course, vital. But the functional side of things is more important in the grand scheme of things.
A few tips to get started:
1) Get the latest version of Magento.
Rely on the most current stable version of Magento, for both the Community and Enterprise builds. Enterprise offers its own suite of expert tools and out of the box solutions for ecommerce businesses. The base build is open-source and has a high number of settings.
2) Page headers.
Initial Magento configurations put the title «Magento Commerce» as the main header. Search engines prioritize earlier words so make it an early goal to replace it with the name of your store or the promoted brand for ease of navigation.
3) Having keywords and descriptors present in the sitemap. Meta-data.
Use keywords that best describe your product or business. Simplicity and coherence will attract more customers. There is a reason to implement this setting for search engines as well; they will rule on the relevance of your page in a user's search request.
Think of your web-site as an employee; an employee who works without a break or vacation, 24/7/365. Productivity is essential.
Clear, coherent and useful information goes a long way to improving the chances of the web-site.
4) Set the «Add Store Code to URL's» to «No.»
Store URL's, if not properly configured, can display lengthy codes and parameters in it.
Eventually, the page gets thrown into a giant pile of comparable (or in some cases duplicate) results in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo. With little to no difference to separate them.
5) Site efficiency.
Enable caching options.
Aim for fast and responsive load times. Avoid putting unrelated data on the site, as it requires users to download it.
6) Representation of products. Images.
An overlooked step, image names and pictures themselves appear in the search results of crawlers.
7) Improve sitemap and indexing.
Sitemaps function, unsurprisingly, as the map of the web-site. It is a file that contains a list of URL's for the search engines to crawl.
Look into meta modules and prevent indexation of the pages without any products or content. It will not clutter search engines with undesirable results.
Magento layered navigation SEO
There is a selection of expert tools that do these sets of optimizations for you. Specialist plugins that come with preset settings for ease-of-use and convenience.
If the technical side of things is too much to handle, consider your options with SEO Magento plugins.
These tools offer, among other things:
- user-friendly solutions, complete with category browsing and filters;
- optimized URL's for layered navigation SEO;
- unique headers and ability to set meta-tags;
- canonical links;
- custom image sizes;
- sitemap customization among many other improvements.
There are many Magento SEO services to choose from, make sure to pick the right one. We hope your business venture is successful and this guide has been of use.