Magento proves to be a one-stop solution for eCommerce websites and online ventures. The platform is the best in providing a stable and secure shopping platform. Whereas, the ever-changing search engine algorithm and the rapidly evolving consumer behavior demands advanced SEO features, which are not present in Magento by default.
To have them in your store, it is suggested to find an extension that is an all in one solution to ensure maximum ranking and exposure in search engine. The Magento 2 SEO extension is one of the commendable tools that combine multiple functionalities. It starts with automating the SEO meta tags and extends to generating image alt tags, XML sitemaps, ahreflang tags, no index, no follow tags, etc. installing such an extension is a must-have when you have to manage an eCommerce website with thousands of pages. Following are some of the ways it can help you boost rankings of your online store.
Auto-generate SEO Meta
Writing SEO Meta tags for a small blog or website is easier, when it may take hours to write for a medium to the large-sized eCommerce website.
First, the merchants and administrators are not sure as how to write and what to write in the Meta title and description of a product page. Secondly, it takes time for them to produce such a kind of content for every page they create. The Magento 2 SEO extension helps store administrators to automatically generate the SEO Meta tags by configuring the SEO templates once and for all.
In the template, they can determine the inclusion of product name, price, features, and relevant keywords. The extension keeps on producing Meta titles, Meta descriptions, etc. without further human assistance.
Appear in Image Searches with alt tags
Visually impaired users or web crawlers may fail to read visual elements such as images of your web shop. To help them know what the visual content is about, we usually add alternative tags to product images. The search bots also read the alt text, which eventually reflects in higher rankings in image searches.
The Magento 2 SEO extension also allows automating the creation of image alt text and tags. For any image that you upload to the product page, an alternative text is produced on the parameters you define. Furthermore, you can choose to rename the images with custom names.
Generate XML sitemaps to be understood
The purpose of generating an XML sitemap is to help search engine bots understand your website structure and extract important information. With the data being extracted, it evaluates the significance of every page against the search queries.
You may also need to generate an XML sitemap to avoid content duplication. The sitemap shows the date and time you publish the content, which entitles you a genuine content creator. Thus, you are safe and the websites copying from your website may be penalized. With Magento 2 SEO extension, you can instantly create XML sitemaps to make the search engine spiders understand your website and retrieve relevant pages from a complex structure.
Display Product Details in Rich Snippets
The on-pages SEO configuration may help you elevate rankings, whereas you may need to ensure a click-through rate as well. One of the effective strategies in boosting click-through rates is adding useful information to the snippet.
By default, Magento may not allow you to include additional information in the rich snippets to increase traffic to your website. The customer visiting a landing page while knowing the basics of a product is likely to spend more time reviewing the description and are more prone to make a purchase decision.
This, in turn, supplements and retains your higher rankings in search engines. The extension is equipped with tools to help you personalize the structured markup language for a better user experience.
Rank different language versions
Running a multilingual store may require you to reach out to customers with localized versions of products that resonate with their culture, language, and ethnicity. There may be multiple language versions of the same product.
To serve the audience with the right version, you may want the page to rank against the search queries of the same language. It all required skillful insertion of hreflang tag. It helps the search engine know the language you are using on specific pages so these can be ranked accordingly.
For example, a global store may have product pages in English, German, and Arabic. Use the hreflang tags in this extension to ensure only the German version appear to people using German, English to the default user, and Arabic version to the users in UAE.
Sustain your store privacy and rank juice
Not every single page of your eCommerce website may be there for the public. You may want these pages to remain private and confidential. But, how come search engines know either to index or not index a page? There is a mechanism for it known as indexing tags. The extension provides you the functionality to set index, no index instructions of web pages.
The websites or resources that you mention on different pages share the rank juice of your website with the referring websites. The do-follow links drain your website authority. You can stop such a rank drain by marking them no-follow links.
Avoid duplicate content issues
Managing different variants of a page may compromise the ranking as well as earn you a duplicate content penalty as well. The Magento 2 SEO extension allows you to implement canonical tags to such pages to assist search engines in giving a rank score to the preferred versions you elect.
As a result, only the relevant or the core version of a page gets ranked while combining the authority of other similar pages as well. Configure the canonical tags to achieve a higher ranking of the primary pages and get more traffic to your eCommerce website.
Final words
Boosting search engine rankings is difficult when you have to deal meet ranking factors for thousands of your web pages. The Magento 2 SEO extension is a complete solution that allows you to configure most of the SEO configurations in a centralized dashboard. In fact, it is a combination of many useful plugins to improve rankings and search visibility.
