Magento SEO tactics

SEO Tips & tricks to implement on your Magento website.

In an infinitely expanding online world, it can be difficult for companies to get the attention they require to grow. Businesses in this day and age are using little tricks everywhere to ensure they stand out from the crowd. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an important consideration for anyone selling online. You might find that simple techniques like changing Meta descriptions/titles or adding alt tags to images (basic SEO tactics) can go a long way. For those of you who don’t know what SEO is, it’s probably best you turn your computer off, sit in silence and try to figure out where it all went wrong.

Why is it important to optimise my site?

With an ever expanding business market, it’s always nice to be noticed. This is the very essence of SEO, improving visibility so your ideal customer is able to find you with ease. Still can’t comprehend the importance of SEO? Well, in simple terms, better SEO = more potential conversions…Now, that got your attention didn’t it?

Tips & Tricks

• Updating your current version of Magento: A good place to start optimising is simply installing the latest version of Magento. If you wish to maximise Magento SEO results, it is imperative that you do this, it’s as simple as that. For other Magento related information, and to find out about their latest updates it’s probably a good idea to follow their blog.

• Changing URLs: Automatically generated URLs can be too long, and may sometimes contain store codes. This is not good Magento SEO practice and if this problem occurs you’ll need to manually change this. To exorcise these cursed URLs on Magento, go to system (located at the top of the admin panel) then click “configuration” which appears on the drop down menu. It’ll take you to a page with a menu on the left, click “web”. Then, finally click where it says “Add Store Code to URLs”, select no…

You’re welcome. ­­

• Image alt tags: This element isn’t Magento specific, but quite often it can be found that product images are ignored and not exploited to their full ability. Since Google cannot recognise what an image entails, an Image alt tag (or alt tag) is a small description of the image given by its creator. So if someone took a picture of a tennis ball, you’d expect their alt tag to be something like “Green tennis ball” (depending on how sane they are). By simply having a keyword-rich image alt tag, you can benefit from an increase in site traffic, higher SEO rankings and more. Want to reap these benefits? Then stop neglecting those poor images begging to be optimised.

• Page speed: With Google noticing the ever-rising increase in the use of mobile/handheld devices, it announced its favouritism for mobile-friendly sites. A quick loading, responsive website will be more favourable to Google and so you might find yourself ranking higher providing your site meets these conditions. Slow, unresponsive sites tend to have a higher bounce rate, and a higher bounce rate means lower ranking on Google.

• Blogging: It has been proven time and time again that blogging is a great way to bring in that little bit of extra traffic to your site. Industry specific articles (bringing in targeted audiences) mixed with hot topics/trends can impact your business substantially overtime. It’s important to note that people are more likely to remember your brand if your blog posts provide some kind of value.

Using these five tricks in conjunction with each other will definitely see some kind of return (if done right). Increased website traffic, lower bounce rates, higher click through rates and higher rankings for search engines are all positive signs. Good luck with your optimisation!