While SEO is important for some online businesses, it’s an absolute must for ecommerce websites.
By default, Magento 2 is one of the most SEO-friendly ecommerce platforms — it offers a bunch of built-in search engine optimization tools and customizable features.
However, as you probably know, SEO is an industry that is constantly in a flux. Hence, you should always be ready to adjust your strategies to the whims of Google’s frequent algorithm updates. Also, Google’s first page is a very competitive spot, and to get there, you have to pay attention to every little detail.
Hence, to get an edge over your competitors, you need not only use the default SEO functionality but also extend it with the help of some 3rd party SEO solutions and some SEO optimization and SEO settings.
In this article, we are going to review one of the top-rated SEO solutions for Magento 2 — SEO Suite Ultimate by MageWorx. This Magento 2 SEO extension will let you fill in the gaps of the default Magento SEO setup and optimize each and every aspect of your campaigns.
Here are the extension’s key SEO features:
Canonical URLs
A common SEO issue ecommerce stores face is duplicate content. With dozens of similar product pages shifting on and off, it’s difficult to keep all metadata, URLs, and links etc. in order. As a result, sites get infected with duplicate content and loses rankings.
SEO Suite Ultimate extension lets merchants cure duplicate content issues by setting canonical URLs. Thus, even if a website has multiple pages with similar content, a merchant can inform the search engines which page is the main one and which pages should be ignored.
SEO Suite Ultimate sets canonical URLs for any product or category page, adds a Pager for category canonical tags, optimizes pages filtered by layered navigation (by pointing them to either the current category or a filtered page) and a lot more.
Meta Robots
With the extension, store owners can significantly improve website crawling and indexation.
SEO Suite Ultimate lets users add any type of Meta Robots header to pages without content, HTTPS pages, and any other selected pages of a store.
Using this functionality in combination with the default Magento Robots.txt Editor, merchants can restrict search engine bots from accessing any private pages, hide unneeded pages from Google, and guide the search engine crawlers to the most important site content.
Cross Links
By using this type of the extension functionality, it’s possible to create a well-balanced and SEO-friendly internal site link architecture.
The extension automatically links thematically relevant store pages and also connects a site to external authoritative web sources.
Product and Category SEO Templates
This functionality simplifies the process of metadata optimization. Even in case you have thousands of products, SEO Suite Ultimate lets you quickly add metadata for all of them at once.
15 advanced SEO meta templates enable store owners to automatically add optimized metadata to all important SEO values (a meta title and description, meta keywords, product and category SEO name, etc.).
Templates can be created for product and category pages and for pages filtered by layered navigation.
All that a store owner needs to do is to create and apply a new template. The extension, in turn, will use the specified attributes to auto-generate metadata for the targeted SEO values.
Alternate URLs (hreflang tag)
This functionality lets merchants avoid duplicate content issues triggered by content localization.
If one has pages with the same content but in different languages, the hreflang tag will inform Google which page is an alternative language version of the main one.
Follow this link to learn more details on it.
Extended Rich Snippets
Although Magento 2 has a built-in rich snippets optimization feature, SEO Suite Ultimate significantly extends this default functionality.
With the extension, it’s possible to add more info into the standard rich snippets: for example:
- Extended breadcrumbs,
- Business Info,
- Merchant info,
- Page/Website Info, etc.
Also, SEO Suite Ultimate lets store owners use Facebook Open Graph and Twitter Cards to enhance content sharing.
Also, the technologies used by the extension are fully compatible with the latest Google and Schema.org standards.
SEO for Layered Navigation Pages and Pager Optimization
The extension lets store owners make pages filtered by layered navigation user- and search engine-friendly.
With SEO Suite Ultimate merchants can optimize landing page meta title and description, set how the search engines crawl, and index these type of pages, and generate SEO-friendly URLs for them.
Also, the extension is capable of optimizing pagination pages (on categories): setting their URL format, adding metadata, etc.
Advanced Breadcrumbs
With this functionality, merchants can help site visitors navigate better through their stores by setting the shortest and longest of the default breadcrumbs navigation paths.
HTML Sitemap
Unfortunately, Magento 2 doesn’t support this type of sitemap by default.
SEO Suite Ultimate lets you make up for it. The extension generates a fully functional HTML sitemap that provides site visitors with a convenient overview of a store structure and lets them quickly find a desired category or product.
Also, the presence of such a sitemap on a website helps the search engines better crawl its pages.
XML Sitemap
Despite the fact that the default version of the platform isn’t equipped with an HTML sitemap, it has a full-fledged XML sitemap.
With this functionality, you can manage how Google sees your website and sets its frequency and priority for each link.
The extension, in turn, lets you further extend this. SEO Suite Ultimate adds a bunch of features to improve the default Magento 2 XML sitemap. Thus, a store merchant can add any number of additional links and set their frequency and priority.
SEO Redirects
And last but not least, the extension lets store owners easily apply 301 and 302 redirects to evenly distribute link juice and prevent customers from getting on the ‘404 Not Found’ page.
To download the extension and learn more about its features, follow this link.
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Have you ever used this Magento 2 SEO extension? What are your thoughts on it? Please share your opinion about it in the comments section below.
