Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial for most of the Magento websites, as search engine brings them a lot of traffic, let’s say, 50%+. However, SEO is still a mystery for many of the Magento store owners, as they don’t know what exactly they need to do when they set up a website. Some of them spend a lot of effort and money on it, but it is not working as they expected. Actually, SEO is not that mysterious. In this article, we’ll brief you the basic concept of SEO and show you how to go with it. It is super helpful for those store owners who don’t know SEO much. For those who had experiences with SEO, this article may still helpful for you.
What is SEO and how search engine works?
SEO is the process of improving the ranking of a website or a web page in search engine results which involves a wide variety of optimization techniques. It doesn’t involve the paid ads from Google Adwords. To know how to do SEO, you should first know how does search engine work.
Mainly, the search engine will do the following jobs:
- crawl & build web pages indexes
- provide answers to a search query based on the indexed
So if you want to have a good ranking from search engine, what will you do?
Firstly, you’ll need to be indexed. Not only to be indexed, but to be indexed well. There’re a lot of techniques that can be discussed here, in following section, we’ll brief you some of them.
Secondly, you’ll need to know what the “flavors” a search engine likes. Basically, the mission of a search engine is to provide the best result to the users when they make a query. So they try to get the most relevant and high quality content to the users. That’s the basic mechanism of a search engine, which means, you’ll need to try to provide the best contents to your visitors.
How to do SEO?
There are two main categories for how to SEO: on-site SEO and off-site SEO.
on-site SEO: refers to everything that you can do with your own website to improve SEO. This involves the strategic placement of keywords in your website content, including page title, meta description, URL structures, headers, etc, building of well organized website structures and internal links, providing high quality content relevant to the topic of the website and so on.
off-site SEO: refers to everything that happens on the internet other than your website and links back to your one. The backlinks can be from either websites or blogs. Each backlinks will contribute for the “impact” of your website on search engine. The strategy here is to get as much relevant back links as possible to your website.
In following content, we’ll focus on specific technical aspects of on-site SEO for your Magento store as this is what we can control directly.
SEO friendly design & development for a Magento website
Search engines are built on top of computer algorithms and therefore, a web page doesn’t always look the same to you and me as to search engines. In this section, we’ll focus on how to design & develop web pages so they’re structured for both human and computer.
Build up indexable content.
Computers don’t read/understand images well at the current stage, so as audios, videos, Flash, Java applets, and other non-text content. In order to be visible to search engines, the easiest way is to make sure all your wordings or phases are written in HTML text on a web page. There’re a lot to discussions for how to organize the content of a web page so as to be better indexed by search engines. The principle is, providing what your audiences really need on the website with well formatted HTML codings. For HTML codings, you can check it out from W3C school.
Be careful for your page title tag
Page title is meant to be an accurate and concise description of a page’s content and search engines treat it as a very important part. Therefore, in order to optimize the page title tag for SEO of your Magento site, you can follow the recommendation below which covers the most critical parts.
- Length of the title tag: Search engines normally display only 65-75 characters of the title tag in their searching result so it is recommended the length of the title tag should not exceed this.
- Leverage branding: To create better branding impression for customers, you can end your title tag with you brand name.
- Hierarchy for the title tag: The starting keywords of the title tag count more for search engines, therefore, you should put the important keywords closer to the beginning of the title tag.
Well organize and structure your website content
Search engines start crawling your website from the index page. Imagine that it needs to crawl thousands of thousands of thousands web pages a day, if you hide your web pages deep inside, search engines will simply ignore them. So we recommend that for the main pages, there shouldn’t be more than 3 clicks for a customer to reach them from home page.
Search engine also like highly connected website, which means, there’re a lot of links in all the pages of the website from one page to another. This can be helpful for search engine to index your pages. Also, it is highly recommend to build up a sitemap HTML page to link to all the main pages of your website.
Design targeted keywords for your Contents
Search engines are designed from the science of information retrieval which are based on keywords. Keywords play a fundamental role for Search Engine as they’re the building blocks of the indexing system for search engines. Thus, in order for your web pages to be searched and rank well, you need to design your page keywords before creating content. For example, if you want people to find you by typing “furniture”, you should organized your content according to it and make it part of the indexable content of your page.
However, it doesn’t mean you should put as much keywords as possible on a page. The pages will be punished by search engine if it founds there are keywords abuse on the page.
Below are some tips for best-practice for design targeted keyword and creating content for your web page:
- Put the keywords on Title Tag at least once, and keep the keywords as close to the beginning of the article as possible;
- Design the keywords and organized the content according to the keywords;
- The keywords should appear at least 2~3 times on the body of the text, depending on the length of it;
- The keywords should appear at least once in the alt attribute of an image on the page. This not only help your web page to be searched, but also the images in the page;
- Don’t put a specific keyword as the title of all your page.
Control Search Engine Spider By Meta Tags
The meta tags play an important role in SEO as they can be used to control search engine spider at a page level. The two worthy mentioned meta tags are meta robots and meta description.
Meta Robots, an example , the content attributes can be the followings:
- index/noindex: this value tells the search engine whether to crawl the page and keep the index for this page for retrieval or not. The value of it is “index” by default.
- follow/nofollow: this value tells whether the links within the page should be crawled.
- noarchive: it is used to restrict search engines from saving a cache copy of the page.
Meta Description: an example
The meta description will be displayed in the search engine result, see below the image:
The meta description tag is the advertising copy, drawing readers to your site from the search results, therefore, it is extremely important part of search marketing. Try to write a readable and compelling description using target keywords to draw higher click through rate of users to your page.
We’ve discussed a lot for on-site SEO in this article. Feel free to let us know if you had any questions. If you have any other SEO experiences, please share them as well.
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