Magento is a great open source platform for ecommerce solutions. It has now been almost a year that the first successful release of Magento was released and during the release there was no tentative guide for Magento SEO. Here are a few tips and tricks for Magento Search Engine Optimization.
- Most Updated Version
Magento was developed to be “search engine friendly” however, there is basic knowledge that must be applied for proper implementation. The most current release is 1.2.1. It is important to first get the most current updated version and then enable Server URL rewrites.
- “Enable” Server URL Rewrites
You can find this setting under System—-Configuration—-Web—-Search Engines Optimization. Now that you are on this setting you can also Add Store Code to URLs under the URL Options - “Secure” or “Un- Secure”
Under secure or unsecure you can find the base URL and set the preferred domain. This will allow you to choose between www and non-www. Now you can set the preferred one without changing the redirect from www to non-www or vice versa. Now you can create a 310 redirect through .htaccess with mode_rewrite. This will also prevent Magneto from adding the SID query to your URLs. Be sure that the Base URL matches the redirect. Add the index.php to the root when editing the .htaccess file.
Around line 119:
RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /index.php HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.mydomain.com/ [R=301,L]
Or, when your Magento install is not in the root but in the sub-directoryhttp://www.mydomain.com/magento/:
RewriteBase /magento/ RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /magento/index.php HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.mydomain.com/magento/ [R=301,L] - Changing the Default Title
The Magento Install “Default” Title is always going to be “Magento Commerce”. To increase your traffic it is first important to understand that Search engines put more weight on words that are closer to the page title. The closer your words are to the title the more likely people will read them and will more likely click on your page. This is designed to benefit the user so that they will find the best results that are most relevant to their searches. First of all you should remove the default title “Magento Commerce”. To remove the default title go to; Configuration— Design— HTML Head. Choose a relevant descriptive title for your website. This title will be used for several non-content pages without custom title, e.g. “Contact Us” and the “Popular Search Terms”, and more. You can also use the “Title Suffix” to add your store name to all the page titles, categories, and products. It is a better idea to keep the Prefix empty, for the reasons mentioned above. Also keep “Default Description” and “Default Keywords” empty. For a non-production environment, to prevent indexing of the site, it may be useful to set “Default Robots” to “NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” but for all other applications make sure it is set to “INDEX, FOLLOW”. Now we are optimizing the of your web-store pages it is a good idea to add the new canonical tag. You can install the Canonical URL’s for Magento Module to add them to your head and improve your Magento SEO. For some reason Magento turns non-set meta robots into a meta tag in this style:
This can result in some very strange behavior in the search engines, so we’ll remove it. To remove this empty Meta’s from your code install the Yoast MetaRobots Module.
- Utilizing Magento’s CMS for SEO
The CMS is a great management tool for your business which also allows you to make content revisions. It is important for SEO to especially update content on landing pages with call to actions. Optimizing your content and engaging the customer can sometimes make or break the sale. Now that up optimized the content you can pick a SEF URL Identifier and page title (keep in mind the points under 1.2). Go to the Meta Data tab to write a description for each CMS page that you actually want to rank with. The keywords are not that important so you can keep the keywords empty. The description is all about relevance. The more relevant the more people will not only click on the page but also stay within the website. It is important to state what’s in the page they’re clicking on and that the information grabs their attention. If you don’t use the Meta description, the search engine will find the keyword searched for in your document, and automatically pick a string around that, which gives you a bolded word or two in the results page.
- Descriptive Categories
It is important to disable the “use categories path for product URL’s” as No! Although Magento gives you the ability to add the name of categories to the path for each product URL it often creates duplicate content which is not good for SEO. To disable this go to System— Configuration—Catalog —Search Engine Optimization— and set “Use categories path for product URL’s to “no”. Now you can change the details for each category by going to Catalog—Manage Categories. The most important fields to complete are Meta Description, Page Title, and URL Key. With Meta Description it is important to put an attractive description here; Keep in mind that people will see the description in the result listings of search engines. With Page Title it is important keep this empty to use the category name including parents categories. When you customize it, the title will be exactly like your input, without the parent category. Last but not least, with the URL Key you should try to keep a short but keyword rich URL. Removing stop words like “the”, “and”, “for” etc. is usually a good idea. Also note that you can set this only for all store views, for a multi-language store you should keep it language independent. For each store view you can specify the Name, Description, Page Title and Meta data. This is a great feature for multi- language stores.
- Optimizing Product Pages
You can set the Meta Information for the “Default Values” and for each “Store View”. Note that for the “Meta Title”, this will overwrite the complete page title, including categories but except title prefix/suffix, and not just the product name.
An important aspect of SEO is optimizing your images. Speed is a very important part of SEO. The faster you page loads the better the experience for the user and the more likely they will stick around to buy your products. In the end, optimizing your images is both good for your sales as well as your customers. It is also important to write relevant alt tags for images and properly name your image files. This can also help increase traffic from the Image search queries such as “Google Images.” This is also important proper alt descriptions for the users that are unable to view your image.
By default the images will be renamed to the product title, the same for titles and alt tags. With some extra effort you can set the titles and alt tags for each product image. To change the default you can set the titles and alt tags for each individual product by going to “Images” of the Product Information where you can then set the label for each product image. This will allow you to update the alt and title tag and you can do this for each specified Store View as well. - Optimizing Magento Templates:
It is important to optimize the Blank Template for Magento. The default Magento themes do not have a great SEO benefit for example, the “Default Theme”, “Blue Skin” and “Modern Theme”. They don’t do a very good job in the use of headings which means it is important to customize these themes to be properly suited for SEO. By default the logo is an
<h1>, which should only be on the front page for proper web development standards. On all other pages it should be no more than an<h3>. The most important thing is to get the title of the content in an<h1>tag, e.g. for a category page should it be the category name and for a product the product name. It is important to clean up the overall usage of headings. First, get rid of the header usage in the side columns, or make the text relevant to the shop by including keywords. It is not a good idea to add “static” and keyword less titles with an<h4>instead, it would be better to change all the<h4>tags in<div class="head">to<strong>tags. Last but not least it is important to optimize your content, at the category pages put the product names in a<h3>and the category name in a<h1>. On product pages, you should put the product name in an<h1>. - Proper Code
Because the templates do not contain clean optimized code, it would be beneficial to move the JavaScript and CSS to an external file. This way a user can cache the files on the first load and search engines will not waste time downloading them. Aiming for speed is very important for gaining more traffic. It is vital for the shop to load quickly. Here are a few ways in which you can increase the speed of your Magento install. First, enable caching. Go to System— Cache Management and enable all caching features. Second, it is important to have a good host and server configuration. With MySQL and PHP opcode cache you can improve the speed of Magento significantly.It is important to limit the number of external files. For each file you make people download, their browser has to create another connection to the web server. It is good for SEO to reduce the number of external files and combine several external files in to one. By default Magento already combine the majority of JavaScript files into one file except for style sheets. By the default template there are 6 style sheets. All of the content style sheets can be combined into one except for the print.css file. It is good to compress and cache both your java script and style sheet files.
- Eliminating Duplicate Content
Once you have optimized the basic configuration and content updates for SEO you may be left with extra duplicate content. For example the following is a demonstration of duplicate content…
domain.com/product.html
domain.com/category1/product.html
domain.com/catalog/product/view/id/1/
domain.com/catalog/product/view/id/1/category/1/
One problem is that the pages are like the product review pages with almost the same content. Another problem is that the categories get a load of duplicate content with layered navigation and the sorting options. This means that a product may be available on 4 pages at least next to the page where it should be available. The key is to get rid of duplicate content pools but still allow them to be spidered but not indexed by fixing the sorting options and layered navigation for categories. The Yoast Robots Meta Module will prevent indexing from occurring for all of the non content pages. Now the search engine will follow all links on these pages but it won’t show those pages in the index. It is now important to “No follow” all unnecessary links. It is important to stop linking to your login, checkout, RSS feeds, Layered Navigation, or any other non-content page existing on your site. - The Importance of Sitemaps
Site maps allow an easier understanding of where your content is for both search engines as well as users. To create sitemap in Magento Simply go to Catalog—Google Sitemap—Add Sitemap—Chose a File Name—Chose Path and Store View—Press Save and Generate. Put Sitemap:http://domain.com/sitemap.xml in your robots.txt file. Make sure you update your site map as you update your inventory.
If you want to suggest the preferred version of the URL for each page you can install the Canonical URL’s for Magento Module to help search engines understand the duplicate content of your pages.
