Magento 2 SEO short Guide
Magento 2 is an incredibly powerful platform, you can get lots of extensions the Magento Marketplace under Marketing Extensions for Magento but in order to make the most of Magento you need to first configure it properly. This short guide shows you how to get started and some links to get you sorted with more information. To ensure your Magento 2 site is google friendly making sure you cover the basic Magento SEO tasks will keep you ranking on Page 1.
- Configuring page titles and meta descriptions correctly
- Using headings correctly, Duplicate content and Images
- Taking search engines by the hand when they’re crawling and indexing your store .
- SSL & Speed optimizing.
You can use a number of extensions to help you to increase organic traffic but reviewing your store content frequently is essential.
1. SEO-friendly URL structure
First thing is to make sure is to ensure your Magento online store is using SEO friendly URLs. Here is what to do to check. If you already have a live site contact us to help you so you do not lose any existing benefits.Login into your Magento Admin panel.
Click “System” and choose “Configuration”. Now, select the option titled “Web”. Here, you will see many options. Click on “Search Engine Optimizations”. Choose “Yes”. This removes index.php from your current URLs. Save the configuration.
To remove .html or .php from the end of the URLs, you need to go to “System” and then select “Configuration”. Here, you click on “Catalog”. Again, you will see many options. Find “Search Engine Optimizations”. Locate the Product Suffix and Catalog Suffix fields. Remove the default entries in these fields. Save the configuration.
Now, ‘re-index’ the URL structure. For this, go to “System” and then select “Index Management”. Check the box next to “Catalog URL Rewrites” and click on “Re-index Data”.
The most important step to increase organic traffic is keyword research. Keywords are phrases that your target audience use to find products online. If you want your Magento websites to rank higher on search engines, research and optimize the keywords in your product text and you URL names.
You can use your keywords to have descriptive URL’s but avoid keyword stuffing in URL. For example, go for a URL structure like this:www.example.com/category-keyword/primary-keyword
Keep track of your competitors and find out what keywords they are ranking for and how they integrate them into their product descriptions. Tools to use include Google Alerts, Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, SERPWorx and Ahrefs among others. Using these tools, you can track your rankings, and how they change in relation to your competitors.
Descriptive page titles enable online visitors to find and quickly understand your products. Page titles are critical because they are the first-page element to be announced by any screen reading software. Without a descriptive page title your online visitors have to do extra work. You will force them to click on the link to read or view the entire page to learn if it’s valuable and useful and could just bounce before they get to the good stuff and you have lost a prospective customer and hit you google bounce rate.
Want to skyrocket your customers’ ecommerce site conversion rate? and reduce your boubce rate? Use descriptive page titles!
Magento is SEO friendly but you will have to tweak a few things to ensure it works. Your page title and meta description have a big impact on both your rankings.
To make the e-commerce pages more visible, optimize the following:- Page Title
- Meta description (appears in the Google search results page)
- Headers and content
- Further details here at the ContentKing website
One of the most common issues that affect Magento websites’ owners is duplicate content.The good news is, with Magento 2.0, there is a way to get rid of duplicate content Here is what you need to do:
- Go to Stores>Configuration>Catalog and scroll down to Search Engine Optimization.
- Set the Canonical LINK Meta Tags for Categories and Product to Yes.
5. Optimize Product Images
By optimizing Magento websites’ product images, you give a site a legitimate chance to improve page rank and faster loading pages leading to more visitors
- Command line
You will need command line tools: gifsicle, jpegtran and optipng. Your hosting might probably have it already you just need to check. Once installed use the following bash script to optimize images:
#!/bin/bash find ./media -iname '*.gif' -exec sh -c ‘gifsicle -b -O3 -o "{}.out" "{}"; mv "{}.out" "{}"' \; find ./media -iname '*.png' -exec optipng -o5 -keep -preserve '{}' \; find ./media -type f -iname '*jpg' -exec sh -c 'jpegtran -outfile "{}.out" -optimize "{}"; mv "{}.out" "{}"' \;Run it from Magento root folder. It will optimize all your images automatically.
2. Google PageSpeed Module
Google & Co developed this great web server extension Google PageSpeed Module. It might be a little difficult to install and configure but once setup it will optimize your images on the fly.
3. Google PageSpeed Insights
This one involves some manual work. Go to Google PageSpeed Insights and run your page through it. Once completed you can download your optimized images (the link will be at the bottom). Repeat this step for your main pages.
Alt tags should be optimized and not stuffed with keywords, alt tags need to be short and clear.