SEO makes a major impact on any online store on the Internet. That’s a simple fact and no matter how much you like it or not, it’d be at least careless not to implement the simplest SEO practices in your business. There are businessmen who don’t really believe in SEO, preferring a word of mouth to spread from a customer to a customer, or maybe more conventional and classic marketing. The good news for non-believers is that you don’t necessarily have to have a 40-pages strategic search engine optimization plan. There are a couple of simple requirements, and there are SEO modules that help to meet them.
#1: Meta tags
The power of these two words in SEO is undeniable. Search engines show users at least 3 things: title, URL, and description. There are also keywords and cloud tags influencing the search results behind the scenes, – “you can’t see them, but they exist”. Bring in your creative copywriting skills – catchy and motivating title will take you right to the top, that’s why content managers are so important in the industry.
#2: Sitemaps
A small .xml file – that’s what it takes to make any search engine crawl your site as fast and as effective as it possibly can. For those, who don’t understand the benefits of using a sitemap, a sitemap is like the Ariadne’s thread and Google is Theseus. I’m sorry to say your site is the Minotaur’s maze, but that’s how the legend goes :).
There is also an HTML sitemap, which is mainly designed and used for usability. It can be also called a layout or navigation, and is important for customer’s comfortable being on your site.
#3: Reviews
If you thought reviews are useless for SEO, you were absolutely wrong. Search engines aim to show you the best of the Internet, especially when it comes to e-commerce. The best price, the best deal, and the best service – that’s why reviews are being taken into consideration and so appreciated in ranking. If you make your store reviews 100% available and SEO-friendly for search engines, your Magento online shop will have every chance to be the number one with a couple of gold stars right next to your site’s name. Saying that, we are smoothly coming to the next tool, Google rich snippets.
#4: Google Rich Snippets
Have you ever noticed unusually styled search results that draw attention right away? A lot of people still think it’s something Google does according to some specific algorithms and there’s no way to get a cool snippet by themselves. Actually, Google encourages webmasters to customize HTML code with tags, developed specifically for different site categories, so they could get a detailed Rich Snippet based on the content of the web page.
Working with SEO tools takes two things: creativity and some programming knowledge. Actually, every single line of code you need to know you can find on the Internet. Therefore, creativity and common sense will be the only necessities. The best thing about SEO is that it has some basic rules and principles, which will always work out for you.