When it comes to e-commerce platforms, Magento is one of the most search-engine friendly systems. If you’re preparing to launch a new store or already have a live site, make sure you aren’t making these common Magento SEO mistakes.
Common Magento SEO Mistakes
1. Home Page Title
Make sure your home page title doesn’t simply say “home.” The home page is usually a CMS page. Get in there and change the title of the page into something more suitable such as “Social Media Marketing – The Savvy Socialista.”
2. Using “default description” field
System > Configuration > General > Design > HTML Head > Default description – Leave this blank or you’ll have such a mess of duplicate descriptions on your store that don’t really describe the given URL. Also, make sure your meta keywords are not “magento, magento commerce.”
3. Not turning on rel=canonical
Save yourself from lots of duplicate content issues. Turn canonicals on for both products and categories.
4. Logo title and/or alt “Magento Commerce”
Make sure to customize your site! Use your logo instead of the “Magento Commerce” at the top left of your site.
5. Forgetting to turn meta robots to “index, follow” and remove robots.txt disallow after a move from staging/dev site to the live site
System > Configuration > General > Design > HTML Head > Default robots “INDEX, FOLLOW”.
Sometimes people leave this as noindex, nofollow on dev server and forget to change it when they migrate to the live server.
6. Building a sitemap with sample products and sample categories
Check what’s in your sitemap.xml before you submit it to Google. Don’t use sample products.
When you avoid these Magento SEO mistakes you can ensure optimal visibility. Ultimately, better SEO should mean more customers and more conversions, so it’s likely worth just changing these few elements to boost your ecommerce business.