Magento E-commerce – SEO Guide

Magento is an open source e-commerce web application that we use as the basis of our e-commerce solution. It’s solely owned by Magento Inc. The Magento e-commerce system is global and is currently used by online retailers with over 150,000 sites known to use it including some well established names such as: large multinational businesses Harvey Nichols and Samsung.

Magento is very powerful and has a large community of developers which are there to help you with developing your e-commerce store. Magento is fairly complex however requiring the user to have some knowledge of PHP and HTML in order to successfully launch their e-commerce store, even as a novice some level of technical skill is useful. This is when the community becomes of great value. Magento offers an open source version of which a fully functional e-commerce store can be created and made live however there is a paid for enterprise version of Magento also for bigger stores.

Unfortunately Magento does have its faults the biggest one being that it doesn’t cater for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) out of the box. If you didn’t know already SEO is one of the most important factors in getting your e-commerce store ranked within search engines. Without rankings it’s going to be difficult for customers and potential customers to stumble across your website resulting in a loss of business. However continue reading in order to understand how to SEO your Magento e-commerce store.

SEO Content

The basic content on the Magento platform needs to be SEO optimised in order to help your e-commerce store rank higher in the search engines. A few things to optimise on the Magento platform are:

1.    Select a few keywords that you’d like your e-commerce store to be ranked under and change the Meta tags, titles and descriptions of every page, category item and product including the URL to reflect the keyword. For example; Magento’s website would have Magento repeatedly mentioned throughout every page of the website in the URL, titles, tags, image tags in order to rank well for this keyword.

2.    General web page content should contain your selected keywords as much as possible. In the about us page, contact us, home everywhere.

3. The real key to good rankings is plenty of good unique web content that makes your website an attractive place for people to visit for advice and information about your key topics. Google and other search engines will love lots of unique content and rank you as more important than competitors that don’t have anything fresh to say.

Effective URLs for SEO

The URL configuration is highly important when it comes to SEO because this is what’s being indexed. The shorter and simpler the URL the easier it is for the search engines such as: Google, Bing and Yahoo to understand them therefore they’re indexed quicker and ranked higher. So for example you should include your product names in the URL’s that you choose to use on your website for products and categories if you want product names to be found easily by Google.

Overall Magento is a great platform and is used commercially worldwide. Its continuous growth means more and more retailers are turning to Magento for their e-commerce stores however a store’s presence is determined by the use of SEO.

We hope this guide has been of some value and for more advice about SEO and Magento please call us on 01538 750 538.