In the changing world of Google algorithm updates, ecommerce site owners are becoming familiar with a menagerie of zoo animals. Whether you are chasing the Panda, dodging the Penguin or looking for the Hummingbird, it is hard to keep up with the best SEO for Magento strategies that will keep your site at the top of the SERPS.
Thankfully, there are trusted and simple-to-implement site strategies that will boost your SEO. Wpromote’s innovative strategy demonstrates how focusing on your website’s performance, on-page content, image tags and page load speeds, you can increase your search traffic and make your Magento site more visible on the web.
Here’s how:
1- Speed up your website
There are many reasons why users may click off your website. If your lowest-converting ecommerce pages have a high bounce rate, your users could be experiencing increased page load times due to slow-loading images, bulky CSS style sheets or multiple JavaScript files.
According to SearchEngineLand.com, Google now counts site speed as a ranking factor in their algorithm. To maintain your rankings, and decrease page load times, use tools to measure your site speed and minimize file image sizes.
If you need help analyzing your page speed, check out Google’s Page Speed Tools and Pingdom.com. With these free online tools, you can identify slow loading website pages and work with your developer to decrease page load times.
2 -Switch to faster hosting
You need to consider many things when selecting a Magento hosting company – and site speed is an important one. If you are experiencing slow load times, check to see if your website is on a shared hosting plan.
With a shared hosting plan, domain owners share bandwidth. Because of the shared hosting, you may suffer slow load times. Moving your website to a dedicated hosting service may increase your page load times and help with usability and SEO.
With a dedicated hosting plan, web visitors can shop and browse your site freely — without any issues — due to an increase in your bandwidth capabilities. Remember, according to Google’s blog, website speed matters.
3- Add alt tags to your product images
To make sure that your product images are included in Google, Bing or Yahoo’s image search results, add alt tags to your image files. ALT attributes are words that describe the images and give the search engine spiders something to read.
To maximize your product images for SEO purposes, include a short and descriptive sentence about the product. It’s also important to name the image file after your page’s main keyword.
Most importantly, don’t keyword stuff your image tags. Alt tags are not the place to repeat your keyword three or four times – once is definitely enough.
To help with slow page load times, compress or scale your images using an image editor such as Photoshop or a free online Image Optimizer via imageoptimizer.
4- Remove duplicate content
When you have a product-based site, it is easy to fill your shopping pages with descriptions straight from the product manufacturer’s manuals. On the web, similar e-commerce sites in your niche could use the same text descriptions on their websites.
Hosting duplicate content on your product pages can seriously hurt your traffic, website rankings and sales. Because the search engines may view duplicate content as a method to manipulate your rankings, it is best to skip the manufacturer’s manual for product descriptions and create new and unique content for every page of your website.
About the author: Dorian Travers is a contributor for The Pro Intern and has always had a particular interest in content marketing and coming up with creative ways to help businesses grow.