The first stable Magento release took place approximately one year ago and the Magento platform along with search engine optimization (SEO) and online searching continue to evolve. To make the most of Magento websites, users should remain updated by downloading the latest release. Out of the box, Magento is one of the friendliest e-commerce platforms from a search engine perspective but there are ways to optimize the SEO features.
Users who do not have time to spend in online forums or communities should hire a professional consultant for assistance with technical optimization. This involves general configuration, setting the preferred domain, and header settings. Magento CMS may be simple but it is also flexible, allowing the user to control every aspect of the pages. Users can manually create a meta description or allow the search engine to find the keyword within the document and select a surrounding word string.
With this platform, users can set the details for each category. Aside from the meta description, they can customize the page title and URL key. Selecting a short URL containing multiple keywords is recommended. “For,” “and,” “the,” and other stop words should not be included. The name, page title, description, and meta data can be specified for each page, which is an especially attractive feature for multi-language sites.
Products pages can also be optimized and the process is similar to that of the categories. Image management is one area that many users overlook but it is important for SEO. By naming image files carefully and creating high-quality alt tags for their images, users can obtain extra Web traffic from various image search engines. These practices also help some readers access a screen reader to view what would otherwise be hidden to them.
Even Magento templates can be optimized from an SEO standpoint. SEO-themed templates are available for download from different sources so users need not do their own customization. The title of the page content should be placed into an H1 tag. For a category page, this would be the category name and for a product page, it would be the product name.
Magento websites must load quickly for a search engine to spider as many pages as possible in one day. Experts can help users increase the speed of their Magento install by enabling caching and recommending a host and server config. They can also help users eliminate duplicate content and enable advanced SEO features.
