The ultimate list of Magento Extensions for boosting your SEO efforts
When you run a website, you have to make use of latest SEO practices to improve its visibility in different search engines. The field of SEO often witnessed considerable changes in optimization techniques (because of Google updates), and webmasters find it difficult to accommodate the new changes. So, search engine optimization is a tough work as you have to utilize a number of techniques to increase the performance of your site.
E-commerce shop owners have a hard time trying to optimize their website for search engines and it only gets tougher as the number of products in the shop increases. Because of the complexity of the task, there are many retailers who, instead, focus on increasing their social presence, and increase the budget for paid advertising in order to compensate, get more traffic, and increase sales. But, all these efforts don’t help much without SEO strategies, as 51% of all visitors (for B2B and B2C websites) come through search engines.
Therefore, you need to do quality SEO for your Magento based E-commerce platform. Many times, you don't get the desired output (leads or sales) despite injecting the best efforts for your site. Fortunately, there are several extensions for Magento that can help you in SEO practices and can increase the rate of conversion. Some of them are highlighted below:
1. Ultimate SEO Suite
Duplicate content is a headache for both SEO professionals and search engines. In fact, duplicate content means that a similar content is being displayed on a number of URLs Such content distract search engines as they can't display duplicate content in the SERPs for search queries made by users. As a result, they punish websites that have duplicate content and downgrade their ranking.
Ultimate SEO Suite helps you to deal with duplicate content issues effectively. It adds canonical links to the head of each product page and helps you to manage Sitemaps in an easy way, which allow search engines to find all pages of your site and index them into their database.
Extension details:
Price: $159
App link: marketplace.magento.com/mageworx-module-seocrosslinksmeta.html
2. SEO Cross Links
SEO Cross Links is an amazing extension, which allows you to add several keywords and URLs to the main pages of your site (such as blog pages, splash Pages, category pages and product pages). It helps users and search engines to find your pages easily and quickly. By doing so, you can increase the usability of your site up to a great extent. With this extension, you get free technical support and functionality updates.
Extension details:
Price: $99
App link: marketplace.magento.com/mageworx-module-seocrosslinksmeta.html
3. Sonassi SitemapChunk
Sonassi SitemapChunk is an ideal extension for all those E-retailers who operate a large scale E-commerce website and want to offer a wide range of products and services to their customers. This extension helps you to cross the limit of sitemap URLs (directed by Google Webmaster Tools and other SEO management applications ) and create several Sitemaps in "chunks" of maximum 40,000 URLs.
Extension details:
Price: Free
App link: www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/sonassi-sitemapchunk.html
4. Layered Navigation SEO
Navigation plays a an important role for all websites as it allows users to go from one page to another and look for the required products and services easily and quickly (rather than leaving the site immediately). Generally, when users face navigation problems on your site, they leave it quickly, which increases its bounce rate.
A site with high bounce rate is unimportant in the eyes of Google and it decreases its ranking in search results. For E-commerce websites, where a sale (or bounce) is just a few clicks away, a clear & reliable navigation will help online shoppers to find their products easily.
The Layered Navigation SEO extension includes a number of navigation features (such as AJAX, Multiple Select, Checkboxes, Price Slider, Show More/Show Less, Drop-Down lists etc,) that allow you to provide an easy navigation on your site and help shoppers to find what they need.
Extension details:
Price: Free
App link: www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/layered-navigation-seo.html
5. Zoom Full-Page Cache
Website loading speed is an important factor that determines the behavior of shoppers (towards your E-store) and the quantum of leads you make. If your site is slow, users will leave it quickly. There are many reasons why a website could slow, but without caching, the loading speed is significantly higher.
Zoom Full-Page Cache extension helps E-store owners to increase the website loading speed up to a great extent, decrease the load on the server and increase the conversion rate . This extension works on a simple pattern. When a user visits your site for the first time, it searches and delivers the page to the visitor and saves its cache. All such pages get accumulated in a cache. When the user visits the website again , the system uses cached information (rather than generating a request on the site's server) and presents the results quickly. This reduces database and server load up to a great extent and makes your site faster.
Extension details:
Price: $99
App link: www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/zoom-full-page-cache.html
6. Aten Software Product Export for Data Feeds
It is important for E-commerce websites to appear on the first page of Google and other search engines to receive traffic and generate leads. Sometimes, all your SEO efforts go in vain and your site doesn't get ranked up in Google. In this case, you lose your business little by little.
To avoid this unpleasant situation, you can use Aten Software Product Export for Data Feeds. This is actually a product export extension for search engines, which enables you to list your products in Google Shopping, Facebook Product Ads, Bing Shopping, and other shopping search engines to get immense traffic on your site and increase your sales rapidly.
Extension details:
Price: Free
App link: www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/aten-software-product-export-for-data-feeds.html
7. Minify HTML CSS JS
Web developers always work on making websites faster. A fast website attracts millions of shoppers, which means more business opportunities. It also rewards a website with better Google ranking. One way to make your site faster is to compress your data as much as possible.
Minify HTML CSS JS is an excellent plugin that helps you to minify hard coded CSS, HTML and JS files, decrease page loading times and make your site faster. This extension doesn't require any additional software or server modules to work, And it also minifies the Magento admin content
Extension details:
Price: Free
App link: www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/minify-html-css-js.html
8. Advanced SEO Suite
Improve the visibility of your eCommerce site on popular search engine platforms by including Advanced SEO Suite extension into your SEO toolkit. It is an incredible SEO extension that enables you to optimize the product categories and product groups for specific search term on a template to help you get higher ranking on Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.
All you need to do is to set up the Meta tags, H1 heading, and write search engine friendly description for your product categories to generate better SEO ranking. It simply optimizes your web store for specific search phrases on the template.
**Extension details **
Price: $ 149
App link: mirasvit.com/magento-extensions/advanced-seo-suite.html
9. Magento SEO PLUS
Although Magento comes with a lot of "out-of-the-box" SEO functionalities, you will still need a powerful extension that can help you achieve your targeted goals with ease. This is where Magento SEO PLUS extension comes in. It is a one-stop solution for all your SEO needs.
The extension helps you optimize your Magento web store for search engines. It sprouts the SEO practices by creating unique and SEO-friendly Meta descriptions, Page Titles, Meta keywords, Meta tags, etc. It also optimizes Robots.txt file, embeds Open Graph tags (OG tags) to help you get the best possible results quickly and easily.
Extension details
Price: $ 99
App link: www.magikcommerce.com/magento-seo-plus-magento-seo-extension/
10. Magento Canonical URLs
Create Canonical URLs for your Magento eCommerce site to get better visibility on Google and other search engines. Apart from adding 'rel' canonical URL to your web pages, it also lets you set custom canonical links manually for your products.
The best part about Magento Canonical URLs is that it allows search engines to know about those web pages or URL of your store that are more relevant for web visitors against a specific search query. This simplifies your job and also stimulate visitors to visit these pages, without any distractions.
Extension details
Price: Free
App link : www.fmeaddons.com/magento/seo-canonical-url-extension.html
Bottom Line
Doing search engine optimization for an E-commerce website and getting the desired results (in terms of traffic, ranking in search engines and sales) is not a child's play. You have to toil a lot at all the times to improve your site's ranking and sales. These are some of the best SEO extensions for Magento that could work as a catalyst in your SEO efforts and help you get what you want!
Author Bio:
Emily is an experienced CMS Developer, currently employed at HireMagentoGeeks. She is taking care of all HTML to Magento conversion projects and has a team of developers to assist her.
