5 Essential SEO Tips For Magento Ecommerce Stores

Competition on the online world is increasing every day. On one hand we have more people tuning to the Internet to not only search for information but also shop online and on the other hand, more business players are entering the ecommerce sector. This intensive competition has made it very difficult to remain on the top. It has also become very challenging for businesses to find customers and vice versa. This is where search engine optimization or SEO comes into the picture.  

SEO needs expertise mainly because search algorithms are largely unknown and hugely complex. The fact that there is little information available on how search engines rank websites makes it even more complex. If you are running a Magento-powered ecommerce store, you will know how difficult it is to remain in the top using keywords that are used by your competitors. Unless you are an SEO expert, it becomes necessary to hire a Magento or shopify SEO expert who helps in improving your rankings on search engine results page. However, there is no harm in knowing about how SEO works on the Magento platform and what the CMS offers to make your ecommerce site search engine friendly. Let’s take a look.   

1. Stress on Clean URLs  One of the easiest and best ways to have clean URLS is by only using common characters and product-related words. Not only are these URLs search engine friendly but they make the links human readable. Magento’s default settings support simple URLs. You can try for yourself following this route - System => Configuration => Web => Search Engines Optimization. All you need to do here is set “No” in “Add Store Code to URLS” in the “URL Options”.  
2. Allow Indexing Sites There are several Magento extensions (such as Yoast Metarobots Magento) that will help you index sites and allow search engines to search them better. However, you can also do this manually by going to System => Configuration => Design => HTML Heads and changing “Default Robots” to “INDEX, FOLLOW”.   
3. Rely on Metadata  Metadata helps streamline search results, thus it is a good idea to update the default metadata that’s set for your Magento store. Do not use the same metadata for all pages. Thus the metadata description for your homepage will not be a relevant one for any specific product page. You should have a metadata that describes every product page differently. Make the changes from Admin Panel. Go to System => Configuration => Design => HTML heads and outline generic rules for the entire site. To set specific metadata for every product category and product page, make the changes in the catalog section that’s to be found on the Admin Panel.   
4. Get Rid of Duplicity Duplicate content can be your biggest enemy. Magento allows you to get rid of such content and sorting your site by making relevant changes in System => Configuration => Catalog => Search Engine Optimization. You will see an option “Use Categories Path for Product URLs” and set “No” from the drop-down menu. Even after making these changes, if you see duplicate contents in various categories, in the “Canonical Link Meta Tag” set “Yes” as an option.     
5. Make Use of Google Analytics Enable Google Analytics and check in real time how your ecommerce site is performing. You can enable Analytics by going to System => Configuration => Google API.   

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Summary
In this write-up we discuss 5 essential SEO tips for Magento ecommerce store so that your online store ranks among the top in a search engine results page. You can also outsource your SEO to a reputed marketing agency.