If you have an eCommerce store, then you probably already know how important search engine traffic is to bringing in sales. There are so many variations to a product search – brand, product name, SKU, attributes (size/color), etc. You need to make sure that your system supports all of your SEO efforts. Magento Commerce is the SEO-capable system that I have had the pleasure of using.
Out of the Box Features
Magento comes boxed with some very powerful SEO features that many online stores fail to utilize.
- Manage Title/Meta tags for each and every product, category, and page
- Manage all friendly URLs
- Ability to add products to Google Base for shopping results
- Ability to generate XML Sitemap for Google’s indexing service
- Clean, SE-Friendly markup
- Google Analytics Integration
I feel obligated to describe the Google Analytics Integration feature in more detail. Many Magento users and developers fail to use this feature. It is extremely powerful and can literally be turned on and working in a few minutes. Below is a screenshot of the ONLY configuration options you have to set in Magento to get it linked with GA.
After that, you will need to change some configuration from within your GA account. For a full walkthrough on this, check out this tutorial on Inchoo.net:
http://inchoo.net/ecommerce/magento/google-analytics-in-magento/
Pushing the limits
Looking to maximize the optimization for your catalog? Here are some plugins/extensions you can use to give your site a small boost.
Canonical URLs (http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/Yoast/extension/906/canonical-url-s-for-magento)
A kind fellow from Yoast developed an extension for Magento that allows users to manage canonical URLs. In short – it fixes duplicate content issues causes by having multiple versions of product URLs.
LightSpeed Module (http://www.tinybrick.com/improve-magentos-slow-performance.html)
One downfall to Magento is that it requires a hefty amount of server resources in order to keep the speeds up. The developers at TinyBrick developed a module that drastically increases page load times and decreases the load on the server. Page load times are a small factor in page ranking.
Meta Robots (http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/Yoast/extension/920/yoast-metarobots)
Another module from Yoast. This one allows you to manage the robots meta tags for products and other store pages. The robots tag controls whether Google and other search engine’s index specific pages on your site.