Basic Guide To Search Engine Optimization In Magento
The need for search engine optimization in this era cannot even be over emphasized. In an age where millions of sites are on the internet, a good search engine optimization technique will help not to get lost in the sea of websites.
By default, Magento offers merchants and website owners on it’s platform a degree of quality search engine optimization setting. You should be fine using their default setting. However, digging a little deeper and tweaking things a little is an added advantage to you.
Magento has already enabled Search Engine Friendly URLs for you. This means that the URL shown in the top of your browser would for instance look like this:
http://yoursite.com/laptops/lenovo-thinkpad
Whereas a non-optimized URL could look as follows:
http://yoursite.com/catalog/product/view/id/8989/category/12
Also, By default Magento install has the title “Magento Commerce”. In order for your store to get the right traffic you need to add your keywords near the start of the page title of your homepage.
When people use search engines and results pop up, they are likely to see the early words on the page title. If your keywords are at the start of your listing your page is more likely to get clicked on.
To add your keywords to your page title, do this;
Go to Configuration => Design => HTML Head.
Remove the default Magento text and add yours.
It is important to use a good and 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”.
To add your store name to all page titles, including categories and products, put your store name in “Title Suffix”. It is a better idea to keep the Prefix empty. 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”.
CMS Pages
At first sight Magento may lack some decent CMS functionality, but for most uses it will be flexible and powerful enough. One of the benefits of this simple CMS is that you can control each aspect of the pages. Once you’ve given each CMS page some decent content, pick a SEF URL Identifier and page title, and go to the Meta Data tab to write a description for each CMS page that you actually want to rank with.
You can keep the “Keywords” empty. The description has one very important function: enticing people to click, so make sure it states what’s in the page they’re clicking towards, and that it gets their attention. Thus, the only well written description is a hand written one, and if you’re thinking of auto generating the meta description, you might as well not do anything and let the search engine control the snippet.
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.
Category optimization
Magento gives you the ability to add the name of categories to path for product URL’s. Because Magento doesn’t support this functionality very well – it creates duplicate content issues – it is a very good idea to disable this. To do this, go to System => Configuration => Catalog => Search Engine Optimization and set “Use categories path for product URL’s to “no”.
Now it’s time to set the details for each category. Go to Catalog => Manage Categories. The most important fields are:
Meta Description: put an attractive description here; Keep in mind that people will see the description in the result listings of search engines.
Page Title: 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.
URL Key: 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.
Aim for speed
A very important factor in how many pages a search engine will spider on your shop each day, is how speedy your shop loads.
You can increase the speed of your Magento install by;
Enable caching. Go to System => Cache Management and enable all caching features, like this.
