Magento is an ecommerce platform that can be installed to be very search engine friendly, and an ecommerce store built using the Magento platform can do exceedingly well in the search engines.
So what are the secrets to carrying out successful SEO on Magento stores?
Meta tags
The Magento store allows you to customise the meta tags so these can be optimised and made as SEO friendly as possible
Free format text entry for products
The more recent Magento installations give freedom to add custom specific text to your products, allowing you to incorporate links and other useful SEO features, provided you are happy writing in HTML. The TinyMCE editor on the latest versions helps no programmers to add useful copy as well.
SEF URLs
SEF stands for Search Engine Friendly! So SEF URLs are Search Engine Friendly URLs and Magento stores have modules that allow these to easily be implemented. Unfortunately many designers think installing this module is sufficient. It is not. It needs careful application based on keyword research to be successful.
Sitemaps
Most installations of Magento will auto generate sitemaps which are usually helpful for SEO. More advanced Magento SEO may partially turn these off to allow more control over the way the sitemaps are shown to the search robots, but having this module is better than nothing.
The secret weapon
The above are all good an relatively standard, so what is the real secret of successful Magento SEO? The most important aspect is not some bolt on module, but the very core of the code, the template. The most successful ecommerce shops will have been built with SEO in mind and optimised at the build phase, not get built and then handed to an SEO company to tinker with. Unfortunately this rarely happens, and most Magento stores we are asked to optimise have already been built.
The best advice we can give anyone is to get your SEO agency actually building the ecommerce store; if they are not skilled in PHP development, then they are probably not best to tackle the SEO on your Magento store. The visual design can be done by your favourite design agency, but building the core Magento templates is ideally done by your SEO agency.
We have provided successful online marketing (SEO and PPC) for Magento ecommerce stores.