I am looking for a total beginners guide to VM related SEO.
I can find plenty of info regarding Joomla SEO but I'd like to know where to start regarding joomla+VM (+multi language sites).
Any help out there?
Not really. But here is some SEO stuff to think about.
General considerations:
Search engine optimisations are the object of many competitors in the web. If you are selling products which are popular worldwide, for example smartphones or books, you will have a lot of powerful competion, both in SEO expenditures and SEO manpower. If you sell a niche product, ranking in top positions within search results is much easier.
Google suggests a lot of things to webmasters, but often the main purpose imho seems to be to cut down the cost of crawling websites for them or to 'restrict' the display of your content to certain areas. Think about it twice. Sometimes it makes sense not to follow their suggestions.
VirtueMart considerations:
Use product categories with relevant Category names and Sef Aliases, add a short meta description and create menu items for each category.
Normally Google picks the browser title as the title in the serps, which is generated by VM as 'Category name' : 'Product name'. Google currently truncates the line if it is longer than 70 characters.
Add a meta description for each (translated) product description text. In most cases Google displays anything between approximately 145 and 160 characters, but it does read longer meta descriptions. If you don't add individual meta descriptions, VM will use the 'Product Short Description' as the meta description.
VirtueMart automatically adds Schema.org markups to a product page. The SEO result should be pretty similar to using a 'Rich Snippet' plugin. Not sure if it makes any sense to use both.
Use product names (words separated with dashes, not underscores or space characters) for your product image filenames. Image names like DC0032.jpg don't tell the search engines anything about the subject of the image. Of course adding 'Displayed Image Title' and 'Image Alt-Text' to the product image information helps, too.
Optionally you may use
A product sitemap like this free one: http://shop.st42.fr/en/catalog/products/virtuemart-2-sitemap.htm
The VM OG Meta Tag plugin from: https://www.virtueplanet.com/extensions/vm-og-meta-tag