The Magento ecommerce website platform is one of the most flexible, robust and scalable to launch a professional online shop. Magento provides you all the tools and features to get your business up and running online. Running your ecommerce website on Magento is just the very first step towards a profitable e-store. You also need search engine optimization, which is really important for an online shopping site since SEO will bring targeted visitors to your website. SEO factors are extremely important to understand as they govern the success of businesses online.
On-Page SEO factors that will keep your Magento e-store on top in 2014 are discussed below:
1. Content Quality and Relevance
Selling any product becomes simpler once you know what the customer wants. Most potential customers who visit your e-store will use relevant words to find the item. To get place on the top of the search page, the content quality and relevance must be your top priority. Unique content on the product pages will attract more visitors and potential customers.
2. Freshness
For the search spiders to rank you higher, the site must be updated regularly with fresh content. Most common reason for no sale or a particular product segment to be dead is ‘stale content’, which is a straight turn off for the search engine and the consumer. You can tackle this easily by updating fresh content to your site. So, the trick here is not just relevant and unique content it must be fresh also.
3. Â Keywords and Phrases
Keywords are the language of the web crawlers. The words you search and the pages that are listed have a connection that is the keyword. General keywords will not really rank well and there is tough competition for them. Proper long tail keywords and phrases that tell clearly about the product should be the focus of SEO for Magento ecommerce store.
4. Â Engagement
Content on pages is a primary source of engagement. Most people read specs and details of products before buying. If you have such engaging content about the product, the customer is happy. An expert SEO analyst will always analyze the behavior of the visitors and improve the engagement appropriately.
5. Website Coding/Site Architecture
Developers usually focus on setting up the store and its process. But to get higher rankings on search engines, you need to be indexed properly with optimized site structure & architecture. Once indexing is done properly, the traffic will increase. Magento provides auto generated site maps, which is for the crawlers to read and understand the site. It contains all the pages and links on your e-store. You must optimize all the URL’s on your site to make it friendly both for search engines and the visitors.
6. Meta Description Tag and Meta Title Tag
Meta tags are important pieces of information about every page that is used by search engines in their results and ranking criteria. It must be optimized with relevant keywords and phrases to rank better. Meta descriptions for pages are highly effective in getting visitors to click thru to your website. For image searches adding alt tags to images is important.
7. Optimized SEO Friendly Product Descriptions
Every page has a most common and important pieced of content that helps the user recognize it quickly – the title or heading of that page. Search engines behave the same way. All the product pages and categories must be listed with heading tag to make sure that it stands out on the page.
8.  Responsive Design:  Smartphone’s and Tablet Optimized
2014 is all about mobile users with Smartphone’s and tablets. According to the latest reports of customers buying online, an ecommerce website gets almost half their visits from people with these devices. A mobile friendly site is of high importance to optimize the user experience & interface (UX/UI) for your website customers in 2014.
Deepak Wadhwani has over 20 years experience in software/wireless technologies. He has worked with Fortune 500 companies including Intuit, ESRI, Qualcomm, Sprint, Verizon, Vodafone, Nortel, Microsoft and Oracle in over 60 countries. Deepak has worked on Internet marketing projects in San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange Country, Denver, Nashville, Kansas City, New York, San Francisco and Huntsville. Deepak has been a founder of technology Startups for one of the first Cityguides, yellow pages online and web based enterprise solutions. He is an internet marketing and technology expert & co-founder for a San Diego Internet marketing company.
