How can Magento increase your SEO ranking?

As far as e-commerce platforms go, it’s well known that, Magento is one of the most search-engine friendly systems. There are many techniques within Magento to make an e-store more visible to potential buyers that a website admin can implement to enhance their e-store ranking in search engine results. These are usually referred to as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. Through some research, a few small changes, experimentation and redesigning, one can be  able to improve Magento’s  SEO and get back on Google’s good side Here is a set of tips for optimizing SEO in Magento, that makes  sure that customers find your store and find the right pages in your store when they are searching for items. Read through to know how can Magento increase your SEO ranking.

1-First, make sure that you have installed the latest version of Magento. Magento’s URLs are pretty     ugly at first. We can easily clean them up with a little help from server rewrites.

• Set System > Configuration > Web > Use Web Server Rewrites to Yes. This makes more user-friendly URLs
• Set System > Configuration > Catalogue > Use Categories Path for Product URLs to No. Due to this  Magento is prevented from making several links all going to the same place and  if this is set to yes, there will be different links for every possible path a user could take to get to your product.
• Set System > Configuration > Catalogue > Use Canonical Link Meta Tag for Categories to Yes. This informs search engines that your category page is the original.
• Make sure your URLs aren’t too long and they are as long as you need to make them relevant.

 2-Go to System > Configuration > Design> HTML Heads

• Change the Default Robots setting to INDEX, FOLLOW so that your website can be indexed by the search engine and can be showed in search results.
• Write the default title and description that you want your pages to have in the “Default Title” and “Default Description” boxes just in case you forget to write a title and description when creating a page. This will ensure that no pages have blank information, due to which indexing would me more difficult

 3-In search engine’s view page titles are weighted heavily. It should be made sure that they are relevant with less than 70 characters .Here is how to change the page titles:

• CMS Pages: For CMS pages, Page Title is the Meta Title.
• Products: Go to Catalogue > Manage Products. Then click on the product you want to edit then click Meta Information on the left and edit the Meta Title field.
• Categories: Go to Catalogue > Categories. Then click on the category you want to edit and then edit the Page Title field.

4-Make sure that your e-store is directly available to search engines by creating a robots.txt file containing commands that directs the search engines to the URLs you want to appear in search engine results and also indicates which you don’t want to appear.

5-Go to this path to avoid duplications in URLs, System > Configuration > Catalogue > Search Engine Optimization and set Use Categories Path for Product URLs to No.

6-Make sure that you write good descriptions for your new  products ,categories and pages that include several words so that when potential customers shop for related ideas or items, search engines can accurately reveal those pages.