The Ultimate Guide to Magento SEO Part 1: Basic website setup

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1 The Ultimate Guide to Magento SEO Part 1: Basic website setup Jason Millward Published November 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Copyright Jason Millward 2014

2 Contents URL Options... 3 Remove store codes to URL... 3 Auto redirect to base URL - www vs non- 3 URL Rewrites... 4 Header settings... 5 Default title... 5 Title prefix... 6 Title suffix... 6 Default description... 6 Default keywords... 6 Default Robots... 6 Display Demo Store Notice... 6 Canonical URLs... 6 CMS Pages optimization... 7 Page title... 7 URL Key... 7 Keywords... 8 Description... 8 Category optimization... 8 Name... 9 Description... 9 Page title... 9 Meta keywords... 9 Meta description Product Optimization Description URL Key Image optimization Image names Alt tags Setting up robots.txt... 12

3 Magento has a range of SEO features that can be easily configured from the admin panel once installed to make your store search engine friendly. In the first part 1 of The Ultimate Guide to Magento SEO guide I will show you how to set up the basic features to ensure that your site is optimized for SEO before launch. The following changes can be made quickly and easily from the Magento admin panel so log yourself in, grab a cup of your favourite beverage and follow this guide to make your Magento store search engine friendly and watch it shoot up the rankings. URL Options Path to options: System -> Configuration -> Web -> URL options Remove store codes to URL When creating URLs we want them to be short and meaningful so they are easy for users to read when they are seen on the search engine results pages (SERPS). Short URLs are also easier for search engines to read. There are times when keeping the product code on the end of URL's could be a benefit, for example when users search for items by product code, in these types of store it can be added to the URL to help with rankings. To stop the store codes being added to the URLs: Set 'Add store codes to URLs' option to 'No' Auto redirect to base URL - www vs non-www Path to options: System -> Configuration -> Web -> URL options When you set your base url during initial setup you can choose between the www or non-www version of the URL. This does not create a redirect to your chosen base URL but simply sets your preference. In the URL options of Magento configuration you can select whether you want to set the auto redirect to 301 (moved permanently) or 302 (found). 301 redirects help to pass link juice and according to MOZ will pass 90-99% to the redirected page whereas a 302 redirect will pass 0% of the link juice to the page.

4 Setting the base URL redirect to 301 is the preferred option and will stop both the www and non-www versions of your site from being indexed and will combat duplicate content issues. Set 'Auto-redirect to Base URL' option to 'Yes (301 Moved Permanently)' URL Rewrites Path to options: System -> Configuration -> Web -> Search Engine Optimization This tells Magento to create search engine friendly URLs for your products and categories when they are created by removing index.php from the URL. The need for search engine friendly URLs on an ecommerce store is obvious as it gives both search engines and users a more descriptive, concise URL to tell them what that page is about. Set 'Use Web Server Rewrites' option to 'Yes'

5 Header settings Path to options: System -> Configuration -> Design -> HTML Head In order for your Magento website to be well optimized for search engines we need to make some changes to this section. Default title The default installation of Magento will display the title 'Magento Commerce' and this will need changing to reflect your store name. It is a common issue of sites going live without robust testing for this title to not be changed. The default title should be replaced by a descriptive title for your website as this will be used for the noncontent pages that don't have a custom title such as 'contact us' and 'popular search terms'

6 Title prefix Keep the title prefix empty as we want the first words in the title tag to be the focus keyword of the particular page rather than being the same throughout the site. Title suffix It is a good idea to suffix your title tag with your brand name so that it is easily recognizable in the search engine results page and encourages users to click on your result as you build brand awareness. Default description Leave the default description blank otherwise you can end up with a lot of duplicate descriptions throughout the site. Default keywords The keyword tag has no relevance for search engines these days due to big problems with spamming over the years so leave this blank. You can remove the keyword tag from the template if you wish. Default Robots On a live website this should be set to 'INDEX, FOLLOW' A pre-production or test environment can should have this set to 'NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW' to prevent these environments from being indexed and appearing in the search engine results pages. Display Demo Store Notice This option should be set to 'No' to prevent this from being displayed on your site. Canonical URLs Magento suffers badly from duplicate content when you create a product. Each product can suffer from URLs being created with the exact same content such as: The rel="canonical" tag helps to remove duplicate content issues relating to the pagination on category pages where every page - '?p=1', '?p=2', '?p=3' - has the same meta information and content. Fortunately you can tell the search engines which URL is your preferred version of your content with the canonical tag. Path to options: System -> Configuration -> Catalog -> Search Engine Optimizations

7 Set 'Use Canonical Link Meta Tag for Categories' option to 'Yes' Set 'Use Canonical Link Meta Tag for Products' option to 'Yes' This will add the following tag to the header of you product and category pages which tells the search engines it is that version of the page that is the default and should be indexed. <href=" rel="canonical" /> CMS Pages optimization Whilst Magento doesn't have the most powerful CMS it does allow you to control important SEO elements with ease. The homepage on a Magento website is usually a CMS page so it is important to ensure that the title and description tags are set correctly on your website. Path to options: CMS -> Pages -> Page Name -> Page Information Page title Page titles are an important on page factor for SEO and should be an accurate and concise description of your pages content. Google usually displays the first characters of a title tag, or as many characters as will fit into a 512- pixel display. Anything longer than this won't be displayed. URL Key This feature allows you to have greater control of the URL for each page and allows you to add keywords to the page independently from the page name set in Magento. Path to options: CMS -> Pages -> Page Name -> Meta Data

8 Keywords This can be left blank as the keywords tag is no longer relevant for SEO purposes. Description Meta descriptions are HTML attributes that provide concise explanations of the contents of web pages and are commonly used on search engine result pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets for a given page. While not important to search engine rankings, meta description tags are extremely important in gaining user click-through from SERPs. They give websites an opportunity to advertise content to searchers and to let them know exactly whether the given page contains the information they're looking for. The optimal length of a description tag is 155 characters. Category optimization Optimizing your category pages is vital for your store to perform well in the search engine results pages. Fortunately Magento makes it very easy to optimize the important elements of the category pages. Path to options: Catalog -> Manage Categories -> Select Category

9 Name The name should be relevant to the products that the category contains. Description If your category template allows you can add some text to describe your category in more detail so that the search engines have more content to crawl. It gives them more of an understanding of what the page is about and should help rankings. Ideally you should try and keep this to a maximum of 2-3 paragraphs so that the products don't get lost in the copy Page title Ensure you add a unique page title to your categories that is keyword focused and concise to avoid duplicate page title issues. Meta keywords

10 Again this can be left blank Meta description The meta description should be unique for each category on your site so you can avoid duplicate content issues. Whilst not a ranking factor anymore the meta description gives you the opportunity to sell you site in the search engine results pages to searchers so this needs to be relevant, catchy and unique. Product Optimization Path to options: Catalog -> Manage Products -> Select product Description In order for your website to rank well you should write a unique description for each product that provides the user with descriptive information that helps them make purchasing decisions. You should never copy and paste your product description or your product will have difficulty ranking and could lead to penalties from the search engines. URL Key This feature allows you to have greater control of the URL for each page and allows you to add keywords to the page independently from the page name set in Magento.

11 Image optimization Path to options: Catalog -> Manage Products -> Select Product -> Images

12 Correctly optimizing your images can help with SEO so it is important to ensure that both category and product images have meaningful names and alt tags in order to aid this. Image names When you save your product images it is a good idea to include the keyword or product name in the naming convention. Using generic image names such as 'product-1.jpg' does not give the search engines any information about that image. A more relevant name would be 'love-hearts-sweets-retro-tin.jpg' Alt tags Search engine spiders are not able to read and understand what the image is about so the 'alt tag' is used to ensure they get information about the image. The alt tag should be descriptive and feature keywords as this will help to provide information to the search engines and help them to appear in image searches thus providing another source of traffic for your website. Setting up robots.txt Setting up the robots.txt file correctly can help with the indexation of your website and time should be spent setting this up correctly. You can ensure that the search engine spiders spend their time on your site crawling the pages that matter and ignoring the ones that don't. To see some examples of Magento robots.txt files visit this post over at Inchoo but remember not to simply copy and paste the examples as this could lead to problems with indexation.