While it’s true that Magento – out of the box – offers some rather impressive SEO capabilities, its true power is in its ability to expand and adapt to any customized needs your business requires. By taking the time to refine and improve your site’s SEO, you’ll get the advantage required to stand out among your competitors.
Below is an outline of how to correctly configure the core of Magento in order to make sure it’s ready to help you rank higher on search engines such as Google.
In case you’re not entirely sure of what SEO is, it (search engine optimization) is an organic way for your website to rank high on search engine results pages (like Bing, Google, and Yahoo). There are many potential ways to improve your SEO, so much so that it can be overwhelming. Magento, luckily, helps to simplify the process with these extensions.
1. SEO Suite Pro Magento Extension v1.2.6
This premium extension comes at a price (roughly $150, not including the cost for a professional installation, which is recommended), but it’s well worth the investment. Few other extensions on the market are as versatile as this one – it supports all versions of Community and Enterprise.
SEO Suite Pro revolutionizes the SEO experience for Magento users, giving you access and control over SEO features that aren’t even part of the default Magento setup, including sitemap functionality, RSS Feeds, product tags, and user-friendly URLs.
2. Yoast Meta Robots
Yoast has a suite of plugins (WordPress) and extensions (Magento) tailored specifically to address SEO needs. The company’s Yoast Meta Robots extension is simple yet powerful. It adds no index, follow Meta tags while preventing the indexing of search result pages and meta tag pages. The extension also prevents the indexing of the no contents page, login page, and register page. These no indexes help to clean up the crawl process of your site, ensuring that the pages that do matter are the ones getting all the attention by search engines.
3. Canonical URL for Magento
Canonical links are an important part of any SEO strategy, but it’s not always easy to figure out how to create these canonical URLs. This extension helps make it a quick and easy process by adding new canonical links to the head of your Magento pages. That way you don’t have to worry about the duplication of content URLs.
4. Semantic Basic
Looking for a way to improve the click through rate of your store on search engine results pages? You’ve found the extension designed to do just that. The Semantic Basic Extension makes it so that search engines (like Google, Yahoo and Bing) display all of your store’s information, such as product prices, availability and images. This is a simple and quick way to help make your SERP entry stand out.
5. SEO Suite Enterprise – #1 SEO extension
Feeling overwhelmed about all the ways your site can improve its SEO? No problem. This extension wraps it all into one package. It helps you easily promote your store online through basic and specific SEO practices.
6. Extended Sitemap
Magento already provides your store with an XML sitemap. However, this extension creates a far more superior sitemap, including displaying product catalog categories and all other CMS pages with a hierarchical structure.
7. SEO Layered Navigation
having an easy-to-navigate system is both SEO and user friendly. This extension helps to boost your search engine rankings by cleaning up your navigation while also generating Meta titles for each and every page.
8. Sonassi Sitemap Chunk
This impressive extension will replace up to 40,000 URLs for Google Webmaster Tools by creating multiple sitemaps.
9. Ultimate SEO Suite by Ahead Works
The last thing you want is duplicate content on your site. This is an SEO killer. Use this extension to fix it. What Ultimate SEO Suite will do is add canonical links to the head of each product page. That way, search engines will refer to this canonical URL as unique content.
10. Advanced SEO by Mageex
This extension will rewrite Meta descriptions for your products, and, if you so choose, it can also use it to automate the URL Rewrite function. The power of this extension also reaches into sitemap management.
A solid foundation of SEO is built on good extensions
SEO is an extremely complex concept that many businesses invest thousands of dollars in. However, because you built your store on the eCommerce Magento platform, you benefit from working with an eCommerce eco-system that’s designed to be SEO friendly. Use these extensions above to help propel your store to the top of results pages and to help your online store stand out among your competitors.
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