The key to success of any e-commerce website is a good online promotion, which increases traffic to the website. As research studies show, search engine optimization is three times more effective in driving traffic to websites than social media and has the highest Return On Investment (ROI) among all marketing techniques, including the traditional ones. One of the biggest advantages of Magento is that it provides you with simple ways of implementing SEO strategy on your e-commerce website, increasing the visibility and popularity of your online store. In the hands of a knowledgeable professional Magento is a powerful tool with features that meet all your SEO needs.
Customizing the URLs and creating a Sitemap in Magento
The first step for successful online promotion is the research aimed at establishing relevant keywords that will drive the customers to your website. It is not an easy thing to do: you want your keywords to be generic, but if they are too generic the chances are that your competitors are already using them to promote their businesses and your marketing strategy might be less effective. Professional SEO managers use tools such as Google Adwords to find the best, commonly used keywords, which are specific enough to match your niche. Once you have established the best keywords for your type of business it is time to use them in practice. Magento allows you to use keywords to create URLs for each of the products in your offer. Magento uses product and category names as default URL names, but you can easily change that in Admin Panel and create URLs with any chosen keyword. Another interesting feature of Magento is the Google Sitemap – here you can provide Google bots with links to all your other websites with important promotional content: blogs, articles related to your products etc. By creating a Google Sitemap you are giving Google robots hints on what to scan for and you gain more control over the type of content you want to promote.
Editing Product Page Meta Data
Speaking about keywords, have you ever wondered what is the most important element of your website from the Google bot point of view? There answer is the Page Title. Why? The Page Title is used by Google as a the first line of all findings on the Google search result page. The most important SEO keywords are usually included in the Page Title. There are also some additional HTML tags (META DESCRIPTION and META KEYWORDS), which give Google bots more instructions and provide you with an opportunity to use more keywords to describe your website. The Page Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords can be easily edited the in Admin Panel. You can create Page Title and HTML tags for each page separately, or create generic rules for all pages to follow.
To sum up, Magento provides you with most the important search engine optimization features, ensuring that your website performs well in Google. These features are easy to use even for less experienced Magento users, although they will be most effective when used as tools for professional SEO campaign.
Written by Marta Gromadzka, a blogger, a copywriter, a marketing specialist.