In order for your eCommerce site to show up on search engines and receive high levels of traffic, you need to improve its SEO. Creating content and building natural backlinks to your eCommerce store will definitely help; however if the code used to build your site isn’t SEO friendly in the first place, you’re going to struggle to get the rankings you want. Luckily, if you choose Magento you don’t have to worry about that. Here we cover the topic is Magento SEO friendly and explain why it’s one of the most SEO friendly eCommerce platforms on the planet! Below you’ll find a run down of some of it’s out of the box SEO features.

URL Configuration

One of Magento’s SEO friendly features is URL configuration. After you’ve installed the Magento platform, you’ll be able to change the default URL configuration to a more SEO friendly format. Magento gives you the option to set up server URL rewrites, turn off store code additions, specify and redirect URLs and completely customise them. Remember that search engines look at the keywords used in URLs to see what a page will be about and what it should rank for. It is therefore crucial that you include relevant keywords that relate to the product or service on that particular page.

Page Optimisation

Magento gives merchants the opportunity to optimise the backend of their web stores. This involves customising different features for the pages created in Magento’s content management system. Below we’ve outlined two of the ways you can optimise your pages:

• Category optimisation – Go to Catalog > Manage Categories in the Magento admin panel and you will be able to set up a page title, meta description and URL for each category in your store. Remember that these values will be displayed on search engine results pages, so you need to ensure they are accurate and not misleading. The more enticing your title and description is, the more likely people are to click on it.
• Product optimisation – Magento also allows you to create meta data for each of your products. In addition to this, it is important to make sure you optimise your product titles and image alt tags too.

Responsive design

If you didn’t already know, responsive web design has an important role to play in improving your website’s SEO. By creating a flawless user experience across all devices, you stand a good chance of increasing your search rankings. Not only that but since Google has released a new algorithm for mobile friendliness, you’ll also be able to benefit from elevated rankings in mobile searches.

The great news is that Magento Community 1.9 comes with a new responsive design reference theme that makes it easy for merchants to create a tablet and mobile friendly version of their eCommerce store. By using the responsive design theme, Magento users can reap the benefits, whilst also avoiding the typical costs and time associated with building a responsive website.

You can also get free responsive design themes from the Magento Connect store.

Performance

Whilst Magento is certainly SEO friendly, one of its downfalls is site speed. Due to the fact it’s a very resource heavy platform, performance can often be quite slow. As you’ll know, speed is an important ranking factor, which is why many merchants question whether or not Magento is SEO friendly.

The good news is that there are a number of different things you can do to boost your Magento website’s performance and make it more SEO friendly. One method involves enabling caching, which speeds up site performance by allowing users to store copies of your eCommerce store on their computers. Upgrading to better Magento hosting can also improve site speed, along with limiting external files.

SEO modules for Magento

In addition to Magento’s SEO features, which come ‘out of the box,’ there are also a number of extensions that can be used to optimise your website even further. Popular SEO extensions for Magento include SEO Suite Pro, Advanced SEO Suite, Unlimited SEO Suite and Magestore SEO Plus. It is definitely worth having a look at these extensions, as they will help you to improve your Magento website’s SEO with minimal effort.

Conclusion

All in all, it’s fair to say that Magento is a very SEO friendly platform. With great out of the box SEO features and the opportunity to optimise your site further with extensions, you stand a great chance of gaining high rankings for your eCommerce store. For more information about Magento SEO and marketing, feel free to get in touch.