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Posted by dani cass on October 7th, 2011

Magento Search Engine Optimisation is quite different from the seo performed on general brochure and catalogue websites. As a specialist Magento Web Design agency, our team of internet marketing professionals are experienced in optimising Magento websites to ensure that your site appears on the 1^st page of Google, exposing your business to a wider audience.

There are many ways that our Magento search engine optimisation team work to increase your website rankings, here are 6 basic tips for optimising a Magento website:

• Optimise the default page title – When you set up a new website using the Magento Commerce system, the page title tags are set to ‘Magento Commerce’ by default. The default page title is highly unlikely to reflect the nature of your business so it is recommended that the default page title is changed as soon as possible to something more relevant to your company. By changing the default page title you will maximise the optimisation of your online store.
  You can change the default page title by going to Systems > Configuration > Design via the Magento dashboard, this will access the html head section where you can input your desired page title.
• Optimise CMS pages – In the screen where you create your cms pages and add content, there are also options to set a custom page design and to add meta data. By accessing the meta data screen, you can add a page description and keywords to your page. The page description you type here, is the description that will be visible in search engine results – so this is really your opportunity to draw the customers in. Most search engines set a 160 character limit so keep your description relevant and to the point while trying to include your main keywords for that product or service.
• Optimise categories – In Magento, you can also optimise your categories through the Catalog > Manage categories menu. For each category you can add a page title, page description and a keyword rich url through the ‘url key’ field.
• Optimise Products – Optimising your products is a very important part of Magento search engine optimisation as it will help your products to appear in a wider range of search results. You can optimise your products through the Catalog > Manage products menu. While creating your product, you can add a meta title, keywords and a description through the ‘Meta information’ tab. Any title added here will overwrite the default website page title.
• Optimise Images – Making sure that your website images are optimised is another important part of Magento search engine optimisation. Optimised images will appear in search engine image results creating an additional source of traffic for your website. Optimised images also add additional keywords to the copy of your website, again assisting with website ranking.
  While creating your product in Magento, you can add alt tags through the ‘Images’ tab, once your product image has been uploaded there will be a field to enter a ‘label’, this is the same as the alt tag.
• Duplicate content issues – A common reason for duplicated content on websites is that there can often be several paths leading to the same page. Search engines class these different paths as individual pages meaning that your website will be penalised for duplicate content and that you will lose link juice. Magento offers the option to use categories in your product urls creating at least 4 different variations of the url per product.
  To disable this feature go to System> Configuration > Catalog and under Search engine optimisation set the ‘Use categories path for product urls’ to no.

For information about how Magento Search Engine Optimisation by Impact Web Solutions can help your business visit  http://www.studio2online.co.uk/search-engine-promotion.php.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Magento Search Engine Optimisation