The importance that SEO plays for online website marketing cannot be underestimated. Without an effective SEO marketing strategy in place, online businesses would have little chance at being successful.

Choosing an e-Commerce platform which includes powerful SEO features would be an ideal solution for today’s modern e-Commerce business. While there are a variety of e-Commerce platforms on today’s market, Magento is known to be one of the best in terms of being SEO friendly.

Check out these 5 must know Magento SEO tips to get your website noticed by Google:

1. Install/Upgrade to the Latest Version of Magento

Make sure to install or upgrade to the latest version of this e-Commerce platform, as it will have the latest security patches and bug fixes available.

2. Optimize Images

An important step when implementing SEO best practices on your Magento site is to ensure that your website images are optimized with titles, including keywords which are relevant and include alt tags.

3. Avoid Duplicating Content

Google frowns upon websites which include duplicate content. In an effort to avoid this SEO no-no, follow these particular steps:

•Go to System =>Configuration =>Catalog =>Search Engine Optimization and set Canonical Link Meta Tags for Products and Categories to “yes.”

4. Enhance Site Speed

google-pagespeed-insights

Providing a good user experience is crucial if you want your site to be considered in Google’s rankings. Make sure your website loading times are no longer than 2 to 3 seconds, at most. Within Magento’s settings you can optimize the speed of your site by following these steps:

• Enable all caching features by selecting System => Cache Management

• Enable both Flat Catalog Categories and Flat Catalog Product by selecting System => Configuration, Catalog => Catalog, Frontend

• Merge both CSS and JS files by selecting System => Configuration, Advanced => Developer => JavaScript Settings/ CSS Settings

• Reduce # of external files that can be downloaded from the server

5. Enable Google Analytics

In order to keep a watchful eye on what is working and what might need improvement, make sure to enable Google analytics. This can be done by following these steps:

• Access your Google analytics account and make sure to have e-Commerce tracking enabled.

• Enable Google analytics within Magento and include your Google analytics account information (System > Configuration > Sales > Google API).