Major Magento SEO Mistakes – Simple Site Killers

If and when you eventually find yourself in a position whereby your Magento Ecommerce store has a loyal following of thousands, chances are you won’t need to worry too much about SEO. Take the likes of Coca Cola or Nike for example – you don’t have to tell anyone who they are or what they do and if a consumer wants to find either brand, they know how to do it.By contrast, nobody knows who you are right now and finding you is difficult…blunt perhaps, but true nonetheless. As such, you need to make the necessary efforts to get your SEO campaign off to a good start and to keep it going for the long-term. Most of the rules that apply to standard site SEO also apply to Ecommerce stores across the board, but at the same time there are both wrongs and rights that are unique to this specific niche.   And with this in mind, here’s a brief look over some of the SEO habits you should NOT fall into for the sake of your Magento store:Using ‘Home’ For the Homepage TitleIt’s one of the most common mistakes of all but one that has SEO gurus foaming at the mouth with frustration. Right now, tens of thousands of Magento sites…maybe even more…have a homepage that’s been given/left with the title ‘home’ which does nothing for its SEO efforts or its overall professionalism. If your site is called ‘Fine Porcelain and Pottery’ for example, then make sure this appears in your home page title…it’s not rocket science!Default Descriptions There’s a great way of making a total hash of your descriptions by way of duplication, which is to leave the System > Configuration > General > Design > HTML Head > Default description field empty. Again, simple to overlook, but guaranteed to hold you back.Forgetting to Activate rel=canonicalThis is another issue that just like the example above will leave you facing a myriad of problems with content duplication. All you need to do is switch it on, so it’s hardly a bind to get it sorted.Site LogoIn the upper-left corner of your Ecommerce store there will as standard be a Magento logo. Pretty enough and great for their own advertising, but in terms of your own SEO and general professionalism, not so much. It’s easy to get rid of, so there’s really no reason to keep it there.Allowing IndexationWhen the time comes to put your site to use on a real live server and start pulling in the punters, don’t go forgetting to allow search engine crawlers to actually begin examining and indexing your pages. This is done by going to System > Configuration > General > Design > HTML Head > Default robots “INDEX, FOLLOW” and is surprisingly frequently forgotten about entirely.Complex NavigationAnd finally, try not to fall into the trap of making your navigation system too complicated, either because you think it looks good or just for the sake of it. The reason being that search engine crawlers hate/cannot work with complex navigation systems and chances are your visitors won’t be impressed either.