Optimizing A Magento Site: Some Tits & Bits
It has been more than a year since Magento was released and the world is yet to receive a definitive guide' to the Magento SEO
. From the blog posts to forums, a lot has been written about it on various platforms but nothing that gives a complete overview of this subject. Though pretty stable, Magento is yet to mature and the best practice in such a scenario would be to stay updated with its latest release.
1. Basic Technical Optimization
1.1 General Configuration: Magento is one of the most search engine friendly e-commerce platforms but still there are many issues that need to be taken care of for optimizing your Magento SEO. The first step would be to get the latest release and then enable Server URL rewrites. Also, it would be best to set the "Add store Code to Urls" functionality to "No".
1.2 Header Settings: To drive more traffic to your Magento shop, there are several things to be kept in mind. Most search engines give more weight to the early words so for a better rank it's better to have your keywords near the beginning of the page title. To increase chances of your page getting clicked, put your keywords at the start of your listing. Change the default Magento title of "Magento Commerce" to a more descriptive title for your website.
1.3 CMS Pages: Initially it might look that the
Magento customization lacks some of the CMS functionality but for most uses it will prove to be powerful and flexible enough. Provide each CMS page with some decent content, pick a page title and a SEF URL Identifier, and write a description for every page you want to rank with.
1.4 Category Optimization: Go to System => Configuration => Catalog => Search Engine Optimization and set to "No" the functionality of "Use categories path for product URL's". It is a great idea to disable this as you are likely to face duplicate content issues with Magento. Specify the Name, Page Title, Description and Meta Data for each store view. This proves to be a really great feature for multi-language stores.
1.5 Products Optimization: Optimization of the product pages is done in a similar way as Categories. Point to be noted is that your Meta Title' overwrites the page title completely, except prefix/suffix. How you handle your images is a very important aspect of Magento SEO that is often overlooked. Naming your image files carefully and providing images with good alt tags would ensure good traffic from various search engines.
2. Magento Template Optimization
2.1 Optimized Blank Template: From the SEO point of view, there is a great room for improvement when it comes to the use of Magento skins as headings. To make things easier for our users, we have developed a Blank Magento SEO Theme which is based on the Core Magento Blank Theme.
2.2 Headings: Insert the title of the content in the tag. Next step is to do away with the over usage of headings. It is a good idea to include keywords and make the text relevant to the shop.
2.3 Clean Up Your Code: Move out all the javascript and CSS in the template files to external javascript and CSS files. For the best
Magento SEO results, keep your templates as clean as possible.
2.4 Aim for Speed: The speed at which your shop loads is a very important factor in determining how many of your pages a search engine will spider on your e-commerce shop each day. The speed of your Magento customization install can be increased dramatically by enabling caching and having a good host and server configuration. Reducing the number of external files and combining them into one is also a great way to increase your installation speed.
3. Advanced Magento SEO and Duplicate Content
After getting all the basics right, all other problems just amount to one thing: duplicate content. Besides, most product review pages on the website have almost the same content. Categories is another problem where you get loads of duplicate content with sorting options and layered navigation.
3.1 No index, follow for non-content pages: Install the Yoast robots meta module with settings to prevent indexing of non-content pages.
3.2 No following unnecessary links: An easy way to make your Magento SEO more efficient is to stop linking your log-in, wishlist, checkout, along with all other non-content pages. Still, there is no plug-in available to work around this in Magento.
3.3 Canonical URLs: Suggesting the preferred version of the URL for every page would help the search engines in understanding the duplicate content on your website. Use the Canonical URL tag by installing the Canonical URLS's for Magento module.
3.4 XML sitemaps are a great way to direct search engines to your content. It might not be very helpful in getting you a good rank but would definitely help you in getting indexed faster. An XML sitemap can be manually created by going to Catalog => Google Sitemap => Add Sitemap, choosing a filename, path and store view, and then pressing "Save & Generate".
by: Christa Hooks
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