9 Important SEO Tips for Magento Based Website

Magento 2 is a popular ecommerce website due to its SEO-friendly features like image optimization, Google Sitemap or URL rewriting. You will also find Magento 2 SEO Extension to be an effective solution for all issues related to SEO. There are some SEO tips to follow for improving site ranking and traffic to Magento website. Read to know about them.

1. Update latest version of Magento – You should update Magento to its latest version all the time as new releases can enjoy great SEO support features for high ranking in search engines. Upgradation involves several enhancements such as performance analysis, fixing the bugs and strengthening security features. Thus, Magento recommends all users to upgrade to the newest version soon.
2. Optimise URLs – It is good if your website URLs do not have any code. For Magento 2, some steps need to be followed for proper URLs. The steps are: Store => Configuration => General => Web  => URL Options, and then set Add Store Code to URLto “No”. Once the configuration gets saved, product/category codes won’t be added automatically to the URLs that makes it SEO-friendly. To clean URLs in the search engine optimization menu, turn Server URL Rewrites to “Yes”. The phrase “index.php” can be removed from the URLs too.
3. Use the right keywords – Magento 2 has sample content for product description and title, however it is not standard for SEO purpose. You will have to edit them by choosing the option: Content => Design => Configuration. The UI shows a Design Configuration table that you may want to edit however, for other settings, => HTML Head. Meta description and title should be unique and keyword optimised.
4. Optimize product images – Experts working in a Magento SEO agency said, the image filename should describe clearly about the image than meaningless numbers and words. The file name is a part of image URL and thus, naming file make URLs easy to navigate for the search engine. The alt text of a picture shows users will have to hover mouse over pictures or sites that cannot render image for some reasons. When search engine scan through your website, the only thing it will read is the text. Thus, alt text describes image to search engines so that they can understand them.
5. Avoid posting duplicate content – Writing unique content is a key factor for SEO and search engine crawlers consider it low on websites that have duplicate content. In order to resolve this issue, inform Google about authoritative URL for that specific page. In Magento 2 Default setting, you can manage to use Canonical Tag for both Product and Category. If you want to allow Canonical Tag option, go to store => Configuration => Catalog => Catalog => Search Engine Optimization.
6. Improve speed of your website – Loading speed may influence ranking of your website. According to the biggest search engine, Google, sites that have low loading speed are usually not preferred. Some Magento SEO tips to improve speed of your website are: Store => Configuration => Advanced => System => Full Page Cache.
7. Generate a sitemap – Sitemaps are extremely important for SEO. Web crawlers should follow links in sitemap to all webpages and then crawl back things for the search engine. In case of Magento 1, you may generate XML as well as HTML sitemap. However, for Magento 2 only XML has sitemap setting.
8. Change robots.txt file – If you want to develop a website without products, then Magento adds a robots.txt file so that search engines won’t index it. By Magento 2 default, Robot setting is “INDEX, FOLLOW”. If you need to change it, then choose Content => Design => Configuration and then store view for changing Robot.txt setting. Finally, you need to scroll down to Search Engine Robot for finding out the configuration.
9. Build network for internal links – Professionals of a reputed Magento SEO agency have said, search engines can understand the relation between web pages, posts and other content by following links. The next Magento 2 SEO tip is to develop great network of internal links by using default product feature.You may link a product with its related items by following Catalog => Products and then select a product to edit. After this, choose related products, Up-Sells, and Cross-Sells => Related Products => Add Related Products.

The above-discussed tips can help improve organic traffic for your website, boost search engine visibility and site rankings. Thus, you may get some effective ideas for improving your site’s SEO ranking.