SEO tools in Google
Google provides some free tools to help with SEO (search engine optimization). All that's required is that you spend a few hours each week researching and analyzing the rich data that Google provides.
Resources:
The first and most important tool is Google Webmaster Tools. It lets you submit sitemaps which let Google know which pages are available for crawling and searching through. It also shows you search data for keywords that are associated with your website. Using this data you can see if your website contains enough of the key phrases that you want to be associated. For example, the GoAugust website is associated with a few keywords that are too general so what I have done is be more specific in any areas where those keywords occur on the GoAugust website.
Another example: we noticed we weren't being listed for Toronto web design or London (ontario!) web design so we added some of those keywords to let Google know that we do web design in those cities.
Here's a full list of features that Google Webmaster Tools offers:
- Submitting sitemaps
- Controlling crawler access (robots.txt settings)
- Demoting pages so they don't appear as sitelinks
- Change of address information
- Viewing search queries data
- Viewing links to your website
- Keywords associated with your website
- Internal links
- Knowing who's subscribing to your news (RSS/ATOM) feeds
- Diagnostics to see there are pages not found
The next tool we're looking at is Google Keywords for AdSense. This tool is specifically designed for AdSense so that you can target high-traffic keywords with your advertisements and entice potential customers into at least checking out your website.
Google Analytics is an excellent tool as well. It keeps track of who is visiting your website and can give fairly detailed information on geographic location, the type of web browser used, etc. This tool has been invaluable in determining where we need to increase our presence (making sure Twitter is up to date and linking back to the site always, or making sure that there's nothing wrong with Google search crawling).
Yoast's guide to Magento SEO has some great ideas for doing search engine optimization for Magento ecommerce websites. The guide is a bit old (it was written when Magento 1.2.1 was released and we're up to 1.6.x right now) but its advice is still useful and relevant today. The most important tip I found was turning on Google Sitemaps in the system configuration. Sitemap generation is turned off by default and this can make it much harder for Google to index the website.
A good tip in Yoast's Guide to Magento SEO is the fact that search engines display the META Description tag. When using Magento and creating products or categories, it's a good idea to fill in the META description with great copywriting because it's the first thing that customers using a search engine will see. If you leave this blank, then the search engine will automatically decide what text to display and the result can be ugly.
Using the above free tools provided by Google you can get very far in optimizing your website for search engines.