Magento SEO
It's now almost a year after the world saw the first stable release of
Magento, and there was still no "definitive guide" to
Magento SEO. A lot has been written on the subject, in the Magento forum and some blog
posts,
but nothing that gives a complete overview of this subject. It's time
to let all this knowledge and experience fall into one big piece; the
definitive guide to Magento SEO.
As search, SEO, and last but not
least the Magento platform evolve, we will keep this Magento SEO article
up to date with tips, tricks & best practices. Because Magento,
though pretty stable, hasn't matured yet, the best practice is to stay
updated with the latest release, at moment of writing 1.4.
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Table of contents
1. Basic technical optimization
1.1. General Configuration
Magento
is one of the most search engine friendly e-commerce platforms straight
out of the box, but there are several known issues that can be taken
care of to optimize your Magento SEO. The first step is to get the most
recent release, 1.2.1. Then, to get started, enable Server URL rewrites.
You will find this setting under System => Configuration => Web
=> Search Engines Optimization. Another good thing to configure now
you are on this screen is "Add store Code to Urls" under "Url Options".
In most cases it is better to set this functionality to "No".
1.1.1. WWW vs non-WWW
Under
"Unsecure" and "Secure" you can find the Base URL, where you can set
the preferred domain. You can choose between the www and the non-www
version of the URL. With changing the setting you don't create a
redirect from www to non-www or non-www to www but set only the
preferred one. Therefore it is a good idea to create a 301 redirect
through
.htaccess with mod_rewrite.
Besides solving the WWW vs non-WWW problem this redirect prevents
Magento from adding the SID query to your URLs, like
?SID=b9c95150f7f70d6e77ad070259afa15d. Make sure the Base URL is the
same as redirect. When editing the
.htaccess file you can add the following code to redirect
index.php to root.
Around line 119:
1 | RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /index.php HTTP/ |
2 | RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.mydomain.com/ [R=301,L] |
Or, when your Magento install is not in the root but in the sub-directory
http://www.mydomain.com/magento/
:
1 | RewriteBase /magento/ RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /magento/index.php HTTP/ |
2 | RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.mydomain.com/magento/ [R=301,L] |
By
default your Magento install has the title "Magento Commerce". For your
Magento shop to get the traffic it deserves you should keep at your
mind:
- Search engines put more weight on the early words, so
if your keywords are near the start of the page title you are more
likely to rank well.
- People scanning result pages see the early
words first. If your keywords are at the start of your listing your page
is more likely to get clicked on.
First of all you should
get rid off the default title "Magento Commerce". Go to Configuration
=> Design => HTML Head. Choose 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, 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
<head>
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:
< meta name = "robots" content = "*" /> |
This
can result in some very strange behavior in the search engines, so
we'll remove it. To remove this empty metas from your code install the
Yoast MetaRobots Module.
1.3. CMS Pages
At
first sight Magento may lack some descent 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, (while keeping in mind the points under 1.2),
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.
1.4. 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.
For each store view you can
specify the Name, Description, Page Title and Meta data. For
multi-language stores this is really a great feature.
1.5. Products optimization
Optimization
of the Products pages is similar to Categories. 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 often-overlooked aspect of Magento SEO is how you
handle your images. By for instance writing good alt tags for images
and thinking of how you name the image files, you can get a nice bit of
extra traffic from the different image search engines. Next to that,
you're helping out your lesser able readers who check out your site in a
screen reader, to make sense of what's otherwise hidden to them.
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. Under the tab "Images" of the Product
Information you can set the label for each product image, this value
will be used for the alt and title tag. Of course you can do this for
each specified Store View as well.
2. Magento Template Optimization
2.1. Optimized Blank Template
The
default Magento skins like "Default Theme", "Blue Skin" and "Modern
Theme" don't do a very good job in the use of headings, so from an SEO
perspective, there is a lot of room for improvement there. To make it
easy on you, we have developed a Blank Magento SEO Theme, based on the
core Magento Blank Theme, which incorporates all the things we've
outlined below. You can
download and discuss it here.
2.2. Headings
By default the logo is an
<h1>
, which is should only be on the front page, and 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.
The
next step is to clean up the over usage of headings. It's a good idea
to get rid off the header usage in the side columns, or make the text
relevant to the shop (ie. include keywords). There is no reason to add
"static" and keyword less titles with an
<h4>
. It is, for instance, better to change all the
<h4>
tags in
<div class="head">
to
<strong>
tags. Now it is time 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>
.
To learn more about why proper headings are important read this article on
Semantic HTML and SEO.
2.3. Clean up your code
All
that javascript and CSS you might have in your template files, move
that to external javascripts and css files, and keep your templates
clean, as they're not doing your Magento SEO any good. This makes sure
your users can cache those files on first load, and search engines don't
have to download them most of the time.
2.4. 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 do two things to increase the speed of your Magento install:
- Enable caching. Go to System => Cache Management and enable all caching features, like this.
- The importance of a good host and server config. With MySQL and PHP opcode cache you can improve the speed of Magento dramatically.
NOTE: there is a rumor that with the 1.3 release of Magento new functionality will be added with huge performance improvements.
Another
thing to look for is the number of external files. For each file you
make people download, their browser has to create another connection to
the webserver. So it is a very good idea to reduce the number of
external files and combine several external files in to one. By default
Magento already combines (almost) all javascript files into one file.
It
doesn't do this for stylesheets though: the default template has
6 different stylesheet files. You can combine the content of these
stylesheets into one new one, except for the print.css file, or you can
use the
Fooman Speedster module.
Besides combining files, this module also compresses and caches your
javascript and stylesheet files. (Please note the requirements for
Speedster: mod_rewrite has to be enabled & and your server needs to
have
.htaccess support. If you use Canonical URLs for Magento and Fooman Speedster together, you need to overwrite the Canonical module with
this download.
3. Advanced Magento SEO and Duplicate Content
Once
you have done all the basic stuff you will find the rest of the
problems amount to one simple thing: duplicate content. Loads of it in
fact. For products you have, at least, the following URLs with exact the
same 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/
Besides
that you have pages like the product review pages with almost the same
content. Another problem are categories, you get a load of duplicate
content with layered navigation and the sorting options. In essence that
means that, worst case scenario, a product is available on 4 pages at
least next to the page where it
should be available.
We're
going to get rid of all those duplicate content pools, by still
allowing them to be spidered but not indexed and fixing the sorting
options and layered navigation for categories.
3.1. Noindex, follow for non-content pages
Install the
Yoast robots meta module and make sure the settings prevent indexing of all non-content pages, like this:
Now the search engine will follow all links on these pages but it won't show those pages in the index.
3.2. Nofollowing unnecessary links
Another
easy step to increase your Magento SEO is to stop linking to your
login, checkout, wishlist, and all other non-content pages. The same
goes for your RSS feeds, layered navigation, add to wishlist, add to
compare etc. Still there is no plugin for Magento to work this around.
You had probably have to go into your template files to add nofollow to
those links by hand.
3.3. Canonical URLs
To
help search engines to understand the duplicate content of your pages
you can suggest the preferred version of the URL for each page, using
the new
canonical URL tag, so you should install the
Canonical URL's for Magento module.
3.4. XML Sitemaps
XML
Sitemaps are an easy way of letting search engines know where your
content is, it won't help you rank, but it might help you get indexed
faster. You can create an XML sitemap manually by going to Catalog =>
Google Sitemap => Add Sitemap, choosing a filename, path and store
view, and then pressing "Save & Generate".
You can then simply put the following code in your robots.txt file to point the search engines to your sitemap.xml file:
Sitemap: http://domain.com/sitemap.xml |
As
your inventory changes, you'll have to re-generate XML sitemaps. To
make sure they're up to date, the best way is to set up a cron job, the
process of which is extensively describe
here.
Conclusion: Magento SEO development
This article has covered all the aspects of
Magento SEO, if you have any feedback, or additions, let us know,
so we can keep improving on this article. We're working closely with
the Magento core development team to improve the SEO aspects of Magento,
so we're actively trying to get some of the ideas in this article into
Magento core.
Original Article by Joost de Valk