Articles 
Magento 2 SEO Extension, And Why It’s Important For Your Ecommerce Store
- AbdurRahman Lakhani
- April 18, 2017
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a critical component for any ecommerce site. According to Kissmetrics Blog analyzing, over 30% of all traffic sources of the 18,000 plus stores in Yotpo’s database was coming from organic searches on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines.
Hence, from our point of view, SEO extension is a must-have for Magento 2 stores if the owners want to grow their business exponentially. We have checked and reviewed many SEO extensions and among them Mageplaza Magento 2 SEO extension completely caught our attention. The extension not only has various powerful features but is also priced reasonably with a simple and friendly configuration.
If you’re looking for a good Magento 2 SEO extension for your store, we’ll hope that this will be the best suggestion for you.
Highlight Features
Schema.org Structured: allows adding schema structured data to your Magento 2 store automatically without configuration to help Search engines display your web pages logically and easily understandable.
Breadcrumbs: helps to optimize the visitor engagement on your site. The Breadcrumb will show the structure of link that customers access, for example, “Home > Category > Post”.
HTML/XML Sitemap: those 2 kinds of sitemaps will provide a better understanding of the site to both search engine spiders and the shoppers.
Smart Meta Tag: includes Meta tags, Meta title, and Meta Description. If the page does not have unique meta tags and content, it’s considered low-quality by search engines. That influences both the page’s performance and the whole site’s performance as well.
Social Integration: the extension has integrated a variety of social channels fluently such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and other popular social channels to make your site more shareable.
Support Google Services: Google Tag Manager, Google Universal Analytics, Google Sitelinks, etc.
SEO checklists: Lists the actions and reports the issues while configuring so the store can perform at the best.
Avoid duplicate content: Duplicate content is one of the main factors that badly affects the site’s SEO performance and this extension helps in that case as well.
More Features
Rich Snippets: helps search engines to better understand the site
SEO criteria: will be set up automatically to your site.
Easily add Follow/Nofollow/Noindex: for Product, Category, and CMS Page.
Add Link Rel=”alternate”: Easily provide a link to an alternate version of the site.
Setup page title, meta description: helps to display a preview snippet of your site on the SERPs.
Support multi-stores : the extension can be set up in multiple stores
RSS Optimization: a smart way to increase your site traffic. The more time a user spends on your site means the higher it will rank.
Customer Reviews
Configuration
With the well-organized and clear configuration settings, it is easy to set up the extension. Besides, the User Guide and the support is always available in case you have any difficulty.
After installing, the Mageplaza section will appear in the Admin Panel and ready to use. This extension is available under Mageplaza > SEO. There are 3 main sections:
- SEO Settings
- SEO Checklist
- SEO Rules
1.SEO Settings
Go to the path Admin Panel > Mageplaza > SEO > Settings.
1.1. General Tab
In this tab, there are 5 configuration fields. In the first 4 fields, you can set Yes/No to enable/disable the feature. For more details, Enable Next/Prev Tag which can improve the connect between component URLs in a paginated series as well as the navigation among the pages while set ‘Yes’ in Enable Sitelink Search Box will show another search box which displays the more detail result.
The last field is ‘Stop Works Package.’ In the drop-down list, you can choose the language of stop words (a, the, of, for) you want to apply. This feature will help to optimize your post or page with a focus keyword without stop words.
1.2. Duplicate Content
This tab contains the configs which help manage your site content better and avoid the duplicate content. For example, the extension will help to disable the ‘ ?price=30-220&brand=abc’ in canonical URL and that means a lot with the SEO performance. With that 2 configs, you can easily enable/ disable by choosing yes or no.
1.3. Social Shares
This section takes care of how the social icon will be active and shown in search results. You can set Yes to allow to add ‘Open Graph meta tags’ and ‘Twitter Card Meta Tags’. In the 2 remain fields, there are 2 boxes in which you can insert the ‘Pinterest Confirmation Code’ and ‘Google+ Publisher Page’.
1.4. Rich Snippets | Structured Data
There are 3 fields on this tab and you can set Yes to enable.
- Enable Rich Snippets
- Enable Product Structured Data
- Enable Organization Information
The Rich Snippets is useful to display the search result in the better look with more information and easy-to-understand.
Here is an example of search results for a movie, including review stars, an aggregate rating value, and vote count:
1.5. Social Profiles
This tab is where you can insert the Social information to display them on the SEPRs. From the below example, you can basically how it works.
1.6. Business Information
In this field, you can choose to display or not the business information on the search result by setting Yes or No.
If choose Yes, the more 7 options will be appeared, allow you to add the necessary business information.
1.7. Breadcrumbs
By choosing Yes, you will allow the extension to provide logical access to all the inner and outer pages of the site, that’s a practice highly favored by search engines.
1.8. Verifications
By adding the necessary verification code in each box, you can easily set the site ownership with Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Pinterest and Yandex Webmaster Tools.
1.9. XML & HTML sitemap
There are 2 types of sitemaps: XML and HTML. Basically, the XML sitemap is specifically written for the search engines spiders while the HTML one is primarily for the users.
In the 2 tabs: XML sitemap and HTML sitemap, the extension will provide many options to config the best sitemaps for your site.
1.10. Hreflang tags
The hreflang tag can help to show search engines which languages your content is written in. You can enable/ disable the Hreflang URL by setting Yes/ No on the Enable Hreflang Url
2. SEO rules
Mageplaza SEO extension allows the store owner to create the specific rule information.
You can go to Mageplaza > SEO Rules > Rules, click on Add New Rule button to set your own rule.
3. SEO checklists
You can access this section by going to Mageplaza > SEO Checklists
With this feature, basing on this status of the notification, you can know what SEO step you have done and which you have pay attention or must do. Hence, it’s easy to manage the whole SEO performance of the site and easily know whether your store is optimized and ready for SEO or not.
Basically, SEO Checklist includes 3 kinds of notification: Success, Error, and Warning.
Conclusion
As marketplace websites are getting popular day by day, you need to step ahead to take advantage of SEO. Mageplaza SEO extension for Magento 2 is a perfect solution. By having many features that are auto-active, this extension will help to optimize your site and boost the SEO performance to a whole new level. With a price tag of $0, this extension is a worthy extension for your store. As a developer, you can contribute to its module on Github as well.
