When choosing a platform, many companies and individuals make intrusion or stop at Magento as they go through lots of comments from upset users, who proclaim that it became too expensive to buy extensions one by one. Competitive product vendors like shopify, wooCommerce advice to try a readymade eCommerce solution that “really works out-of-the-box” like their own.
What we want to ratify here is Magento isn’t dumb in terms of SEO and not too many extensions are needed just to mess up the matter and ignore truly working plug-in by overriding same options with other plug-ins.
Companies with over 5+ years of experience using the Magento framework on a variety of projects along with multiple open source frameworks including PHP, XML, jQuery, and a wide range of other web-based languages have executed work in R&D capacity for developing extensions and modules for Magento and have played a key role in establishing new techniques and standards to enhance SEO perspective of this most widely used shopping cart software.
Although we are not going to run a side-by-side comparison with Magento 1.0 or with other platform like Drupal or Joomla, given below is a succinct list of SEO features available by default or can be avail with free options which consists of new & useful SEO functionalities to easily optimize search engine aspects:
- Site URLs
- Page titles and meta tags
- Alt tags, H1 headings
- 404 redirects
- Facility of adding XML sitemap to a robots.txt file automatically
- .htaccess editing
- Internal links management
- New schema.org integration
- Google tag manager to allow users to update and create tags anytime
- Universal Google Analytics & Ecommerce Tracking
- Tracking adWords conversions
amongst many others.
Therefore the platform has proven itself better in efficiency and integration by approach with Google as strategic tie up. Only a few extra-ordinary techniques that may not be widely practiced in industry are executed by premium extensions like ReloadSEO or Mageworx SEO suite on top of afore-mentioned functionalities but will be sooner adapted in any upcoming version of Magento 3.0 series to avoid rely on third party collaborations. Thus we have the most direct control over the on-page optimization factors.
Content optimization is one of top 5 severe parameters in digital marketing whether it is from viewpoints of SEO, PPC, social media or backlinking. Not to forget part is that where human intervention is necessary, no tool can automate that. Examples are HTML/TEXT ratio, quality content generation and infographics where web developer has to do research and write fact based statistics for a specific business niche. These cannot be achieved by even paid plug-ins or any software although tools can detect birds-eye view level problems by scanning a website in its current state.
Recent upgrades show that tool has ability to optimize search engine indexation by editing robots.txt files from its admin panel v3 and a more complex and extensive set of options are available for optimizing category level pages.
Functionality namely product fields auto-generation helps in consisting formation of the product meta tags using product attributes according to the predefined templates. We can find it in admin panel under Stores –> Configuration –> Catalogue but there is a geek: this feature would change meta-text for all products as it consumes only one template.
Canonical URLs issue: It is important to steer canonical URLs rightly to avoid a lot of duplication that can be caused by layered navigation. Packed with new version, the URL preservation feature gets rid of the query parameters in URLs so whatever you sort or arrange categories using the available filter options, the category page URL will remain basically the same, hence it will take care of a lot of canonical issues aroused by same pages who posses changes across timeline.
Finally, sales is unpredictable and depends on market situation which encounters many identifiable as well as unidentifiable parameters like economy of specific country, technology upgradations, environmental disasters, seasonality, product invention or it may be scheduled server down. None of these can be quantified or mapped directly to blame performance of webshop software.
So to summarize, Magento 2 default SEO functionality is more powerful and robust than its predecessor.
