Zend Anwar

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of actions merchants take to make sure their e-commerce store shows up when customers search for their products through a search engine, whether it be Google or any other search engine. This can make a big difference in your strore’s visibility and sales.

Ragan.com, specializing in communications, put together key points that cleary show the implications SEO has for your business:

Search is the No. 1 traffic driver to sites – 3 times that of social media
75% of search engine users never scroll past the first page
Almost 40% of customers come from search

Altough Google claims that relevant content your users will love is the key to high search rankings, SEO professionals think that there are other things you can and should do. We bring you an overview of to-do things in order to improve your search engine rankings:

Content Checklist

1. Product names and descriptions

Do your products contain the search keywords you want to attract? If you have a large catalog and tend to upload your product names and descriptions from your suppliers, you should make sure that you are customizing the product names, descriptions and short descriptions to include important keywords. The same rules apply to category names and descriptions.

2. CMS pages

Writing and creating content for the web is very important as having informational pages with well-written, keyword-rich content help you attract customers interested in your products. Magento’s CMS pages are a great place to feature how to product guides, products videos or summaries of their content, and other types of information you find to be relevant.

3. Blog

Blogs are important places to feature high-velocity content, which can help improve your rankings. Ideas for the holidays, comments on topics trending on twitter or in the news media are great subjects for your blog and will help you attract short-term search engine traffic. While Magento itself does not offer blog functionality as a core function, there are several extensions available that allow you to incorporate a blog in your store.

4. Reviews

User-generated content is a magnet for search engines, and product reviews by actual purchasers are a great way to encourage users to add information to you site (besides the fact that shoppers find them useful). For taht purpose you can use the built-in review system that comes with Magento.

Effective use of Meta Data

Meta Data is information on your website that is not visible to your users but is used by search engines to display results. Optimizing your meta data will not only have a nominal effect on search engine results, but it will help improve your click-through rates when your results are displayed. The meta-title shows up as the link text and the description is the text below it on most search engines.

Meta-titles should be approximately 60 characters in length and descriptions should be limited to 155 characters. Note: Magento shows a 255 character limit, but search engines have recently decreased the number of characters they display in search results.

Down with the keyword strategy

In Magento and many systems there is a space to enter keywords about a specific page. In the old days of the web, search engines used this information when determining page rankings. However, all major search engines have disavowed the use of this field because of rampant abuse by keyword spammers. In fact, that keyword field is now a negative as it signals to your competitors what your keyword strategy is. We highly recommend you remove any text you have in the keywords field.

Meet canonical tags

Canonical tags help you avoid communicating duplicate content to Google and the other search engines. Magento takes care of them for you automatically. You just need to make sure you have them turned on in System > Configuration > Catalog > Search Engine Optimizations.
Be sure to choose YES next to both Use Canonical Link Meta Tag selections.

What is your site about?

Focus the search engines on the relevant sections of your site as you don’t want Google to crawl your site and index your account log in, cart, checkout and other pages as they confuse Google as to what your site is about.

We recommend a 3-pronged strategy

•     A good Robots.txt

•     Submit an XML sitemap

•     Use robots meta tags

A well-crafted robots.txt file should be sitting on your server. Google has a nice explanation if you aren’t familiar with it, but it basically tells search bots to ignore parts of your site. If you don’t have a robots.txt file on your server, the search engines may get confused trying to index your site. To find out if you have one, simply add robots.txt to the end of your url, for example, “www.yourstoresdomainhere.com/robots.txt”. If you get a 404 error instead of something that looks like this, you don’t have one!

Another thing to do is submitting a sitemap to Google and Bing webmaster tools accounts. There is a great blog article on the mechanics of it. It doesn’t require any tech knowledge to set up, though you may have to adjust the permissions of a folder on your site. Your xml sitemap will help the search engines focus on the important pages of your site.

Image research has shown that page load times on retail sites are increasing. As we cram more and more code and content into a single page thinking to increase appeal, we may actually increase bounce rates and sink our search rankings. Google has been very open about its initiative to speed up the Internet hence punishing websites that take longer to load.