Every second a few new online stores appear in the Internet as this process has been simplified over years. The competition has become tougher and you should use many SEO and marketing techniques to be on the top and what is more important - stay there.
I'll list the most important things that should be properly implemented in your Magento store. Most of them can be achieved with a little coding but there are also many SEO extensions for Magento shops out there. Check out the tips if you don't want to lose this online battle for more customers and sales.
Keywords
Though Google has become smarter since those days when a page stuffed with plenty of keywords could rank #1, you should not overlook this side of SEO.
Of course, you should not make keywords your main tool of search engine optimization, they should be treated as like a base for it. You should clearly outline a set of words and key phrases for each page and combine them in one topic.
Meta Information
Meta info consists of the Title tag and Meta description. They are all seen in the search results (if Google doesn't change them to better match search query).
One the one hand, these meta tags should be written according to the chosen keywords; on the other, they should answer the searcher's question as well as be appealing. Moreover, all the meta tags should be unique. It's hardly achievable if you have large products stock, but it's not necessary to set meta tags manually in Magento, you can use special meta tags templates for that.
SEO-friendly URLs
SEO-friendly URLs mean that they can be easily read and understood by search engines and users. How do they look like? The main idea behind such URLs is logic: each page address should tell us what this page is about. For example, this example.com/56%&id=78987 doesn't tell us much about its contents, does it? Compare to this https://amasty.com/improved-layered-navigation.html , it's much better, right?
So try to keep URLs in your Magento store simple and understandable.
Canonicalization
Each site, even a very small one, contains pages that Google may consider duplicates. They are sorting pages, pagination and the like.
Canonicalization means that if you have 2 identical or very similar pages, only one of them is primary and the other one is duplicate, so the latter should canonicalize the primary page with a special tag. As a result, Google will treat those pages as a single page but not as 2 duplicated ones.
Internal Linking
Your site is one unity, and its pages are closely connected. So why not show it by linking them to each other. That is called internal linking.
You can interlink text or products. The latter is also known as related products, up-sells and cross-sells, they will also help you increase average order amount. Sounds good, yeah?
Rich Snippets
Rich snippets help you provide more info about your business and products right on the Google search results page. While using them won't improve your rankings, it can increase CTR and let you get more search traffic as a result.
There are different types of rich snippets: ratings, price and stock - for products; company logo and additional info - for organizations; breadcrumbs, etc.
So Are You Ready?
Have you checked your site? Are you using the basic SEO techniques listed in that article? If not, you will have to. Moreover, the online world is evolving, Google invents new algorithms and you should keep up with all of that to stay in the industry.