Magento has long been a leading ecommerce platform and has proved itself to be better than all other shopping cart solutions. The estore owners of today are always on the lookout for experienced Magento SEO experts so that their store can rank better on the search engines and attract the right amount of traffic. However, you have to be really careful about applying SEO strategies as they can make or break the impression of your store. There are some common Magento SEO mistakes that you must avoid at any costs if you want to boost your conversion rates and sales. Take a look at some of them.
Failing to optimize title tags
It is very important to make changes with the title tag. There are many SEO professionals who love to optimize title tags but they usually apply the wrong method. For eg, while making the title tag for home page, they title it as ‘Home’. But they need to understand that the title of the home page should be such that it describes the business and its services. An SEO expert will usually understand how title tags work and provide you with the best optimization so that your website can rank high.
Using duplicate URLs
Duplicate URLs are a strict no no if you want your ecommerce search engine optimization to be successful. If you think there are issues of duplication with your URLs, go to System-Configuration-Catalog-Search Engine Optimization and select the option ‘No’ in the field of ‘Use Categories Path for Product URLs’. You can also go to the Admin section, Select System Configuration-Design-HTML head and come up with a new title in the ‘Default Title’ section. You should also make sure that your title is unique and relevant with your business.
Sitemap with staging URLs
If you want your Magento store to rank well on the Google, make sure your Sitemap is free from unnecessary URLS. Some Magento store admins forget that there is a difference between the URL of a staging and live site. And since they forget to remove those URLs, lot of just urls get added in Google search index adversely impacting website SEO. So it is always a good idea to create an XML sitemap by using the right URLS from the live site.
No index, No follow
The step to be followed after making a website live is getting its pages indexed by search engines. If you forget to change robots.txt to enable site, your site won’t get indexed on Google. To enable site indexing, you must check the robots.txt file and meta robots directives that can be found in the
section of every page. Set them to INDEX – FOLLOW by default. Make sure you can check it at System -> Configuration -> General -> Design -> HTML Head -> Default robots.Not using alt tag for your images
It is high time for the store owners to understand the importance of product photography. Images are everything when you are selling your products on estore and displaying them. You might be making some image related mistakes unknowingly. One of them is not using alt tag on your images. So make sure you go back to all your images and add alt tag to all of them. It is important to do this as the search engine spiders cannot identify what your picture is about. When you write a description that goes with your image, it helps to improve the ranking of your website.
Not Turning on Canonical URL setting
Turn on canonical url setting for all your products and categories and avoid your website from getting penalized due to duplicate content issues. Canonical url tags tell search engines which version of your urls is the primary one and that gets index and all others get ignored for ranking purposes. Thus if you have more than one urls for any product or category (typically www and non www versions of your urls, but can be other types of duplicate urls as well), your website wouldn’t suffer due to duplicate content issue.
Disregarding user generated content
Search engines love customer reviews. This is because the reviews are what lead your buyers to purchase products from your website. A research conducted by eConsultancy concluded that “Website visitors that consider both reviews and customer questions are more likely to make a purchase. These visitors are likely to spend 11% more than people who do not interact.” So do not undermine the user generated content. Instead, get your customers to provide reviews and interact as much as possible.
Refrain from committing the seven mistakes mentioned above and you will definitely improve your rankings on Google. If you are new to Magento SEO and want an easy way to take care of all the above steps and all other on page SEO tasks, you can use our best selling Magento SEO extension, SEO Hub.
