Whether you are a store owner who wants to go online or someone who wants to start a business by building a website on the Magento eCommerce platform but doesn’t know how to generate traffic to your site, this is the right article for you. Here you can find all the needed information to optimize your Magento website’s performance.
What is Magento?
Magento is an open-source eCommerce platform with a variety of features. More importantly, Magento is considered one of the best eCommerce platforms for online selling and one of the most search-engine-friendly eCommerce platforms. It gives retailers complete control and flexibility over their online stores’ design, content, and operation.
The Magento e-commerce platform comes with many extensions that may be readily integrated to meet specific company requirements. In addition, it also develops an app for smartphones that helps retailers stay competitive in the market by offering elegant design, quick checkout, and superior customer support.
Magento SEO Best Practices
The main purpose of SEO is to help your site get higher ranks when customers use search engines to find the products.
Here we can list 5 SEO best practices that Magento users can implement to get the highest result:
1- Install the latest version of the Magento 2 platform
The very first step to achieve a high search engine ranking is to ensure that your website is updated to the latest Magento version.
Related: Magento 2 Multiple Wishlist Extension
The new version often goes along with more advanced features and better security that can support SEO performance as well as improve the website’s security
2- Optimize Images
Image optimization influences a site’s SEO performance in a variety of ways. There are 2 important criteria of the image that need to be considered.
Optimize image size and format
First of all, the image size and format in your site have a significant impact on the loading speed since these images consume a lot of data.
Whereas most eCommerce customers today are not as patient as before, they will abandon the site if they have to wait for a long loading time.
Related: Best Image Editing Tools
In addition, Google and other search engines will place a premium on presenting and ranking sites with proper picture sizes and weights at the top of the search results page.
Therefore, you should use some editor tools to compress and resize the images before uploading. Besides, you should use common image formats such as JPG, PNG, and GIF to ensure high display quality.
Optimize ALT tags and image file name
Search engines can not define by themselves exactly what your images contain without ALT tags and names.
The more easily searchable your picture names are, the more likely your site will show in customers’ search results. If Google can read and understand the image title and alt tags, it will give your site’s product a higher ranking.
Therefore, you have to make sure that all the upload images have proper ALT tags. The image name should be clear and informative. In addition, you can add keywords to ALT text to help your images rank at a higher position in search results. Remember that ALT text should be around 125 characters.
3- Optimize Content
Avoid duplicate content
Duplicate content can cause some trouble to search engines since it will be confused to choose proper content to index and display in search results.
Related: How to Find Duplicate Content?
The most suitable solution to deal with this issue is to use Canonical tags and the Robots.txt file. Robots file helps to disallow search engine crawlers from crawling duplicate content.
Focus on long-tail keywords and long-form content
People normally think that the product description should be clear and short but the truth is the opposite. Long-tail keywords and long content are always better than short content.
Related: Best Tools to Find Long-Tail Keywords
To set your content apart from the competition, focus on long-tail keywords and phrases that your potential clients will look for. Above all, it improves your site’s ranking on Google’s search results page.
Optimize meta tags for product detail pages
The meta description should not be too general. It must correspond to the search queries, include target keywords and a thorough summary of the page’s content.
Related: Evergreen SEO Strategies
Besides, title tags should be simple and descriptive, and most importantly, they should match the search intent of prospects.
4- Optimize Website Loading Speed
The fast loading speed can influence search engine rankings. Customers will like accessing your website if it loads quickly, and search engines will reward you for it. There are various ways to improve your site’s loading speed.
Firstly, you should choose the right hosting provider who offers hosting packages optimized for the Magento eCommerce platform.
Related: Best Website Speed Test Tools
Secondly, you can use the content delivery network which is available in the market to boost site speed.
Thirdly, you should utilize browser caching. This strategy allows retailers to optimize site load times by removing the need to re-download data each time a visitor returns to the site. Finally, you should merge your Javascript and CSS files to reduce load time.
5- Create Backlinks
Related: How to Acquire High-Quality Links
Websites with greater authority backlinks tend to have high organic search engine rankings. As a result, including backlinks will assist the website in achieving higher positions in the main search engines, as well as generating targeted traffic.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Magento is known as an SEO-friendly platform with numerous features that aid website performance. However, if you can use some SEO best practices, you’ll be able to improve your site’s ranks and, as a result, drive a massive quantity of traffic to your site.
Another very important point on SEO is the optimization and compression of images on the site. Here is an interesting article on this topic: https://optipic.io/en/blog/images-seo-optimization/