As far as e-commerce platforms are concerned, Magento stands at the top position in terms of the overall performance. With its customizability and power, Magento still serves as the go-to platform for retailers out there. It is especially true for enterprise organizations. Magento is still the leading choice for multiple enterprise websites.
In 2019, it was observed that more than 30 percent of websites used Magento. If you are working in the e-commerce SEO domain, it is essential to learn how to use Magento for your e-commerce site. Let us understand all about Magento SEO and how it can assist your e-commerce site.
What is Magento SEO?
It is regarded as the set of SEO principles that are relevant to the Magento platform. Magento features a set of dedicated features for search engine optimization, like different ways to redirect pages, sitemap.xml, and robots.txt files. Magento SEO offers information about duplicate content from improper canonical tags, faceted navigation, and the absence of blogging functionality.
Here are some ways to improve SEO on the Magento platform:
1. Crawling and Indexing
One of the biggest SEO concerns with the Magento site is likely to be the concept of faceted navigation. Faceted navigations can lead to major crawling and indexing issues as the mere presence will exponentially increase the total number of pages that can be effectively crawled. As pages in the concept of faceted navigation will only either narrow or sort existing products, these pages can ultimately lead to the creation of multiple types of similar content.
If the Magento store makes use of faceted navigation, you might consider leveraging effective steps to control the crawl. Here are some steps you can undertake:
- Auditing to come across low-quality, indexed pages from the concept of faceted navigation.
- Reviewing the log files of the site to come across low-quality pages that are being crawled
- Blocking the crawl of low-value parameters with the help of robots.txt
- Only allowing pages with the high search potential to be indexed
2. Optimizing URL Paths
Magento will go ahead with adding the URL extension ‘.html’ to the end of the product as well as category URLs. While it is not entirely bad for SEO, it still creates lengthier URLs that are difficult to read from the user perspective. URLs that do not feature the ‘.html’ extension will deliver a cleaner format for users.
3. Using Headings Correctly
The fact that headings are used correctly in the Magento store will depend on the following factors:
- Structuring of the headings within the theme
- Use of headings in the content
A relevant heading structure will help visitors in quickly scanning a page, while helping search engines effectively understand the structure and topic. Here are some of the best heading practices you can leverage:
- Avoid wrapping images or logos with the H1 heading tags. It is because H1 heading depicts the main topic of the page. Therefore, your H1 tags should contain only meaningful text.
- Try using a single H1 heading for every page.
- For improved readability, you should stick to the maximum length of 60 characters.
- Avoid using headings for global elements that might be present on every page, like for search functionality
- Avoid applying H2 headings to product categories or product names
- Develop your heading structure within a logical hierarchy
4. Looking Into Robots.txt
The robots.txt file will let the crawlers know about the rules of engagement as far as accessing URLs on the site is concerned. For e-commerce stores like Magento stores, it is crucial to make use of the robots.txt file for sending search engine crawlers in the right direction. It also allows them to avoid touching the wrong URLs towards:
- Reaching potential crawler traps
- Preventing duplicate content
- Preserving crawl budget
While search engines are excellent at understanding crawler traps, they are expected to be down for finding out later that it is a crawler trap. Your Magento 2 store will feature a series of URL patterns that you do not want search engines to touch.
5. Using Pagination Attributes
By default, Magento does not make use of pagination/prev attributes on paginated pages for explaining the relationship that exists. Google has put forth that it no longer requires this attribute. Still, there are different search engines out there as well. As far as pagination is concerned, it is recommended to make use of the following strategies:
- Applying self-referencing canonicals to paginated pages
- Not disallowing paginated pages through the robots.txt
- Not applying non-index robots directives to the respective paginated pages
6. Considering HTML Sitemap
When you make use of HTML sitemaps, it assists both search engines and visitors come across the most important pages on your website. For large-sized Magento stores, you can consider setting up HTML sitemaps for the most important sub-categories, categories, and some of the popular products.
In contrast to Magento 1, Magento 2 does not feature the functionality to generate the HTML sitemap. Therefore, you are expected to either develop one by yourself, or leverage a plugin for the same.
7. Optimizing Site Speed
Magento will require relevant server resources to execute seamless running. Therefore, having a solid Magento-optimized hosting platform is crucial to the overall success of the Magento e-commerce store. Some of the essential requirements of the hosting provider to ensure optimized site speed are:
- Optimized for Magento
- Running on Nginx
- Support for Varnish and Redis
- Compatibility with CDN
Conclusion
One of the best aspects for Magento website owners is that the platform is already designed well for SEO. As it serves to be open source, store owners have ample control over the particular SEO elements of the site like sitemap.xml, metadata, redirects, and robots.txt. While there are some SEO issues that you might run into as a website owner, Magento offers SEO specialists and site owners dedicated tools to fix the relevant issues.
To learn more about Magento SEO best practices, you can reach out to digital marketing experts at Opositive. The digital marketing experts here are well-versed with different aspects of SEO and digital marketing to ensure success for your site.
