Your New Ecommerce Site – Optimising a fresh Magento install for SEO
With ease-of-use content management systems like WordPress now so prevalent, setting up a website is no longer considered outside the ability of the majority and has become second nature to many. It shouldn’t have been difficult, then, to predict the rise of similarly ‘easy’ E-commerce solutions, and there are now several well-known ones available to consumers, such as BigCommerce and Shopify.
These might be all well and good up to a certain point, but if you’re looking for a heavily customisable, enterprise-level platform, you’re almost certainly going to need to get your head down and work out which market actually meets your needs. For a lot of companies, that need is most comprehensively met by the open-source, ebay-owned platform known as Magento.
Magento has a reputation as a solid foundation from an SEO perspective, and it’s a well-known, well-supported and highly successful platform; so, just like throwing up WordPress on a domain, you’re already 90% of the way towards great rankings and performance, right? Well, no - not exactly.
The platform’s rather tech-savvy audience, drawn in by the powerful CMS and its open source nature, can mean it has a relatively steep learning curve, and relying purely on the default settings can leave your new site in a bit of a muddle. So, if you’re in need of guidance to ensure that your new Magento site is as optimised for SEO as it can be out of the box, here’s a quick guide to get you started.
Getting Started – Friendly URLs
Double check and ensure that you have the latest version of Magento. Log in to the admin back-end and navigate through the following steps: System -> Configuration -> Web.
The first option we want to look at here is ‘Add Store Code to Urls’. In most cases it’s preferable to set this to ‘No’, unless you intend to use multiple languages or any other configuration that requires multiple stores. Setting this option to ‘No’ will keep your URL structure clear of any unnecessary directories, ensuring they are more readable both for users and search engines.
Next, change the ‘Auto-redirect to Base URL’ to ‘Yes (301 Moved Permanently)’ as this will ensure that any authority links built to other versions of your Base URL pass the juice to your preferred version.
Look a little further down the page from the ‘Web’ options to the ‘Search Engines Optimizations’ tab, and set ‘Use Web Server Rewrites’ to ‘Yes’. This will remove the ‘index.php’ from your URLs, making them cleaner and more readable.
Next up are the options for your Base URL, which are in tabs headed ‘Secure’ and ‘Unsecure’. This section allows you to declare your preference for either the WWW or non-WWW version of your domain. Ensuring that you have ‘Auto-redirect to Base URL’ set to ‘Yes (301 Moved Permanently)’ will ensure that this Base URL is used consistently.
Header Optimisation
The options for this section can be found by navigating through System -> Configuration -> Design -> HTML Heads.
First off, if your site is ready to be indexed and visited you’ll likely want to change the ‘Default Robots’ setting to ‘INDEX, FOLLOW’ – an instruction to search engines that they are able to index the content and follow any links. If you’re still in pre-production and don’t want the site to be indexed, then set this to ‘NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW’ for the meantime, but be sure to change it in the future.
You’ll find that on a fresh install that the ‘Default Title’ field is populated with “Magento Commerce”. I can say with some degree of surety that this isn’t one of your target keywords, so ensure that you replace this with an appropriate page title. This title will also be used for any pages that don’t have a custom page title, so consider whether it’s appropriate for ‘Contact Us’ and any other similar pages.
Title Prefix and Suffix are terms that will automatically appear either before (prefix) or after (suffix) the page title across all pages on your site. Using your brand name here is a good idea, and a suffix is preferable to a prefix as search engines often lend more weight to words appearing earlier in your page’s title.
If appropriate, you can provide a default description here, which will fill in the Meta description for any page that hasn’t had a custom description provided. I’d recommend that you create bespoke meta descriptions for each page, however, as this will aid click-through rate. Similarly, leave ‘Default Keywords’ blank as these are no longer a ranking factor.
CMS Pages, Categories & Products
For the next step in the optimisation, navigate through to System -> Configuration -> Catalog -> Search Engine Optimization, expand the tab and locate the option ‘Use categories path for product URL’s’. Setting this option to ‘No’ will remove potential duplicate content issues within the category structure of the site. By default, Magento will include the category name in every product URL, but as some products will appear in multiple categories, this can lead to problems.
E.g. if the product ‘polish’ appears in the category ‘mens shoes’ and ‘womens shoes’ you can end up with identical pages on the following URLs:
However by setting this option to ‘No’ you can ensure that the page only appears once, on the URL http://www.examplestore.com/polish.
Under this ‘Search Engine Optimization’ category you should also enable ‘Canonical Link Meta Tags’ for both Categories and Products and make sure that ‘Create Permanent Redirect for URLs if URL Key Changed’ is set to ‘Yes’.
At this point, you can look to optimise the CMS Pages (where you’ll find your Home Page, Contact Us, About Us and other utility pages) and the Category Pages. Firstly, navigate through CMS -> Pages and provide a suitable Page Title and URL Key for each of these (keep your target keywords at the forefront of your mind) as well as a custom meta description.
Now navigate to Catalog -> Manage Categories and repeat that process here. Meta descriptions are vital at this point, as a well-aimed pitch can drive increased traffic and, ultimately, sales. Create a short but keyword rich (not stuffed) template for your URL Keys and stick to it, keeping them consistent wherever possible and removing redundant stop words such as ‘the’, ‘and’ etc.
Lastly, you’ll need to continue this approach across your products – accessible via Catalog -> Manage Products. Be sure to add a unique URL key, page title and Meta description. Ideally you’ll also want to provide completely custom descriptive text and to use a relevant filename and image alt for each product, this will avoid duplicate content and maximise their search visibility.
Giving Google the Heads Up
This final section will take you through generating a sitemap and authorising Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics.
For the sitemap, navigate to System -> Configuration -> Google Sitemap. This section allows you to set the Frequency and Priority for each page type that we’ve just configured – Categories, Products and CMS Page. Once you’re satisfied with the settings, expand the ‘Generation Settings’ tab and set ‘Enabled’ to ‘Yes’.
Now, return to the HTML Heads section (System -> Configuration -> Design -> HTML Heads) and paste your Google Webmaster Tools verification tag into the ‘Miscellaneous Scripts’ field. For Google Analytics, navigate to System -> Configuration -> Google API, locate the ‘Google Analytics’ tab, Set ‘Enable’ to ‘Yes’ and paste your Account Number into the field provided.
Going through these steps should ensure that your Magento store is set up and ready to go for SEO. You’ve dealt with any duplicate content issues, identified a Base URL for the domain, ensured that your CMS pages, categories and products are all SEO-friendly and optimised your URLs for both users and search engines. You should have a great foundation to start building up and promoting your site and hopefully you’ve become much more acquainted with the admin back-end in the process.
The hard work starts now! There are some problems inherent to every E-commerce platform and you’re going to end up having to deal with them at some point; whether it’s pagination woes or layered navigation issues. If you’re looking for increased flexibility, expert options and finer control you can do a lot worse than looking for a specialised SEO extension (there’s that open source benefit again) to help with some of the heavy lifting, and it just so happens that we’ve developed one of the best on the market. Find out more about it here.
