How to do SEO for (Magento) E-commerce site ??

[UmerShoukat]

Hi! I am going to share basic SEO practices and some common mistakes which every SEO does.Kindly add your reviews too.

1.The very common mistake is descriptions of products are not unique and the meta descriptions are not unique. some time s these are duplicate of the same site's products. This problem normally lies when website have so many products. This Error effect your site badly and stops to rank.
So check Plagiarism for product descriptions.
2. Website have many 404 pages.Because when you remove an old product from your website it's URL still ranks in google, When user click on that link it shows 404 error. Which gives user bad experience and increase the bounce rate. SO best practice is take a look on it weekly base if the URL of removed product have high authority and have strong back links then Redirect that link to related product. Other wise remove that link from search result so that user gets good experience on your site.
3. De-index security pages such ad admin access page and checkout pages etc from google search results.
4. Don't forget to put language tag in your site.It is very important because this will tells google where to show your site.
5. last but not the least some times people have multiple social profiles on the same plat form. like they have 2 profiles on g+ two on intagram etc. This is also not a best practice. Make single and unique profile and link them with the website accordingly.

Here are some Common points which i have raised hope these will help others. Share point which you have in your mind.
Cheers!

 

[exciteseo]

Interesting topic, thank you!

 

[UmerShoukat]

Thank you for reading

 

[Parcelhub]

Great tips Umer, we wrote a similar article which may be of interest: http://www.parcelhub.co.uk/10-seo-tips-ecommerce-sellers/

 

[apricot]

Great title thank you for sharing this.

Can i ask couple of questions? I appreciate if you can help

1- How to set up 'canonical' link on magento? I'd like products directed to 'category' page - not the home page though, just to main category page. How can I do that?

More importantly, how can I test this and make sure it works fine?

2- We have so many items and we have so many URLs goes down to 404.

We redirect them to home page or category page but the number of these links is now around 50k. (Under catalog/URL Rewrite Management)

Do we need to delete them at some point? Do we need to do anything about them? Shall we continue to keep them under 'Catalog/URL Rewrite' ? I just think that the number of redirected links are very high, something should be done about them but i don't know what that is.

Thank you,

 

[rodion]

Thanks, useful stuff

How do they manage 301 redirects by the way?

 

[UmerShoukat]

Hi Apricot!
Answer to your first question. You can find an extension to put canonical tags in Magento. We can do this manually but number products are high that's why you should go for extension for automation.
For testing purpose you can go to webmaster > html improvement tab there you can find if any one have duplicate meta tags or descriptions. There are some other ways using google quires but this one is most easiest.

if you have to many links with 404 first find out strong links those have better PA and ranking in google redirect only those URLs Remove other all links via webmaster
Goto google index > remove links. And remove them from search results.
Cheers!