Magento Search Engine Optimization: You've built a great online store and all you need now are customers. This is where this invaluable tutorial comes in. Specifically written for Magento users, it uncovers the deep secrets of successful Search Engine Optimization.

An entire book could be written on keyword distribution for e-commerce websites; however, as the aim of this book is to cover the main aspects of optimizing a Magento store, we cannot go into too much depth. Instead, we'll focus on three major considerations when choosing where to place our keywords within a Magento store:

The purpose for choosing keywords to optimize on our Magento store must always be to increase our sales. It is true that (generically speaking) optimizing keywords means driving visitors to our website, but in the case of an e-commerce website, the end goal—the true justification of any SEO campaign—must be increasing the number of sales. We must then make sure that our visitors not just visit our website, but visit with the intention of buying something.

The keywords we have chosen to optimize must be relevant to the page we are optimizing them on. The page, therefore, must contain elements specifically related to our keyword, and any unrelated material must be kept to a minimum. Driving potential customers to a page where their search term is unrelated to the content not only frustrates the visitor, but also lessens their desire to purchase from our website.

The structure of our website must complement our chosen keyword. Competitive phrases, usually broader phrases with the highest search volume, are naturally the hardest to optimize. These types of keywords require a strong page to effectively optimize them. In most cases, the strength of a page is related to its level or tier within the URL.

For example, the home page is normally seen as being the strongest page suitable for high search volume broad phrases followed by a tiered structure of categories, subcategories, and finally, product pages, as this diagram illustrates:

With that said, we must be mindful of all three considerations when matching our keywords to our pages. As the following diagram shows, the relationship between these three elements is vital for ensuring not only that our keyword resides on a page with enough strength to enable it to perform, but also that it has enough relevance to retain our user intent at the same time as adhering to our overall purpose:

You may be forgiven for thinking that optimizing our most competitive keyword on the home page would lead to the best results. However, when we take into account the relevance of our home page, does it really match our keyword? The answer is usually that it doesn't.

In most cases, the home page should be used exclusively as a platform for building our brand identity. Our brand identity is the face of our business and is how customers will remember us long after they've purchased our goods and exited our website.

In a typical Magento store, we would hope to see the following keyword distribution pattern:

The buying intention of our visitors will almost certainly differ between each of these types of pages. Typically, a user entering our website via a broad phrase will have less of an intention to buy our products than a visitor entering our website through a more specific, product-related search term.

Normally, our most competitive keywords will be classified as broad keywords, meaning that their relevance could be attributed to a variety of similar terms. This is why it makes sense to use top-level or parent categories as a basis for our broad phrases.

To use our example, Wooden Furniture would be an ideal top-level category to contain subcategories such as 'Wooden Tables', 'Wooden Chairs', and 'Wooden Wardrobes', with content on our top-level category page to highlight these subcategories. On the Magento administration panel, go to Catalog | Manage Categories. Here, we can arrange our category structure to match our keyword relevance and broadness.

In an ideal world, we would plan out our category structure before implementing it; sadly, that is not always the case. If we need to change our category structure to better match our SEO strategy, Magento provides a simple way to alter our category hierarchy.

For example, say we currently have a top-level category called Furniture, and within this category, we have Wooden Furniture, and we decide that we're only optimizing for Wooden Furniture; we can use Magento's drag-and-drop functionality to move Wooden Furniture to become a top-level category.

To do this, we would have to perform the following steps:

We will see that our URL has now changed from http://www.mydomain.com/furniture/wooden-furniture.html to http://www.mydomain.com/wooden-furniture.html.

We will also notice that our old URL now redirects to our new URL; this is due to Magento's inbuilt URL Rewrite System. When moving our categories within the hierarchy, Magento will remember the old URL path that was specified and automatically create a redirect to the new location.

This is fantastic for our SEO strategy as 301 redirects are vital for passing on authority from the old page to the new.

If we wanted to have a look at these rewrites ourselves, we could perform the following steps:

There are many configuration options within Magento that allow us to decide how and what Magento rewrites for us automatically, and these will be covered within Chapter 7, Technical Rewrites for Search Engines.

CMS pages within Magento are primarily used as information pages. Terms and conditions, privacy policy, and returns policy are all examples of CMS pages that are created and configured within the Magento administration panel under CMS | Pages.

By default, the home page of a Magento store is a CMS page with the title Home Page. The page that is served as the home page can be configured within the Magento Configuration under System | Configuration | Web | Default Pages.

The most important part of a CMS page setup is that its URL key is always relative to the website's base URL. This means that when creating CMS pages, you can manually choose how deep you wish the page to exist on the site. This gives us the ability to create as many nested CMS pages as we like.

Another important point to note is that, by default, CMS pages have no file extension (URL suffix) as opposed to the category and product URLs where we can specify which extension to use (if any).

For CMS pages, the default optimization methods that are available to us are found within the Page Information tabs after selecting a CMS page:

As mentioned previously, we would focus optimization on these pages purely for the intent of our users. If we were not using custom blocks or other methods to display product information, we would not optimize these information pages for keywords relating to purchasing a product.

Within CMS, category, and product pages, there will always be the option to specify Page Title, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords, and most importantly, the ability to add content to the page.

If we take a look at a normal Search Engine Results Page (SERP)—in this case Google—obtained using the search query Magento open source download, we will see that two of these elements are used directly in the result listings (Title and Meta Description):

The code used to display the preceding result is as follows:

<title>Open Source Ecommerce Software &amp; Solutions | Magento</title>    
<meta name="description" content="Download the Magento Community Edition, our free open source ecommerce software solution for expert developers and enthusiasts!" />

Depending on the search query used, Google may return the meta description, or alternatively, extract a snippet of text from the content that it believes to best represent that page for the given query. The same applies to title tags; when a more specific query is used, the default title tag may be changed to better suit the query.

An example of Google returning extracted content rather than the meta description can be seen here (through the search phrase Magento ottoman):

The meta description that is present on the page is:

<meta name="description" content="Ottoman" />

From this, we can see that Google has chosen to return the extracted snippet from the product description, most likely due to the meta description being entirely inadequate for the search term.

The best practices for these elements are well documented in SEO circles, and the following is a brief breakdown of each:

A really quick and easy adjustment we can make to our entire website URL structure is to remove the default index.php string that is appended to the base URL—for example, http://www.mydomain.com/index.php/my-product.html—and also auto-redirect to our base URL if the non-www version of our domain is entered.

In order to achieve these small fixes, we should perform the following steps:

As long as our server has been configured correctly and our default .htaccess file is in place, Magento will automatically remove the index.php string from our URLs and continue to serve our pages as normal. By performing the preceding steps we will also be setting up an automatic SEO-friendly redirect for non-www versions of our URLs.

As mentioned previously, Magento comes equipped with the ability to rewrite URLs for category and product pages. Depending on the configuration we have decided upon, Magento will create entries within its core_url_rewrite table in the database to accommodate changes to the URL key of a category, a product, or the categorization of a product within our store.

In order to adjust how Magento rewrites our URLs, we can change certain options within System | Configuration | Catalog | Search Engine Optimizations as shown in the following screenshot:

If we take a quick look at this section, we will notice that there are many options, all of which require explanation:

Duplicate content is the main worry when it comes to e-commerce websites. The ability to double-categorize products is both a blessing and a curse; a blessing for users who may look for a certain product under two separate categories, but a curse for search engines, which will find identical content on two separate URLs.

The canonical HTML tag has been given to us for this specific purpose. It is used to point search engines to a specific URL—the URL that we want our search engine to display in the SERPs.

Here is an example of a canonical tag:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com/ottoman.html" />

For categories, the canonical tag is used to determine the static URL of that category. That is to say that when filters or pagination features are activated, the parameters appended to the URL should not be cached as separate duplicates of our category page.

In order to set up our Magento store for best optimization practice, we would want to set our configuration as follows:

When we set Use Categories Path for Product URLs to No, we were telling Magento to serve our canonical product link to our users when they browse our categories. We could have set this to No even if we hadn't enabled our canonical tag for products; however, product URLs will always exist in the same two places. For example:

Ideally, we want to restrict both our users and search engines to only one version of our product page.

Restricting our users to the single URLs (without categories) will allow us to maintain consistent link-building equity for each page. Directing search engines via the canonical tag will help resolve duplicate listings in the SERPs and any algorithmic penalties attributed to duplicate content violations.

As Magento is such a large system, every element cannot be expected to be manually entered before being used in the system. That is why Magento has a fall-back process in place for a lot of configurable options. These can be found within System | Configuration | Design | HTML Head.

For SEO purposes, the main default elements we are interested in are:

These defaults are intended to display content to both users and search engines wherever we have failed to populate the relevant field in our administration panel—primarily for CMS pages and categories.

In many instances, Default Title will only be used when a custom development has been made and a title is not specified within the Layout XML, the PHP controller file, or some form of admin configuration. Default Description, however, will be used whenever Meta Description is left unpopulated on a category or CMS page.

Duplicate meta description and title tags are extremely bad for usability. For any page that we wish to perform well in search engines, we must ensure that we have a unique meta description, and if possible, a unique title. This allows search engines to better discern individual pages and also makes it easier for users who are searching for our content to instantly find the correct page among multiple results.

For products, Magento handles the default meta description and keywords tags differently; they are usually prepopulated with the following information:

As our products should all be unique, this inbuilt system is a useful tool for large Magento websites that are set live without all product meta information being initially entered.

As we know, Magento should only serve up these default attributes if we have failed in some way to enter the information ourselves. To maintain a good standard of usability for these types of situations, it is a best practice to populate these fields with relevant data (this data can also be modified on a per-store basis):

An example of this could be:

Finally, within our HTML Head section is a small but extremely important option called Default Robots.

When a Magento website is under development on a test URL, we would normally find the value of this select field to be NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW, essentially blocking search engine spiders from accessing any page in the Magento system. It is therefore of paramount importance that, once the website is launched on the live domain, this select option is set to INDEX, FOLLOW, or our Magento website may never be indexed by search engines!

A quick reference for each of the available four options is as follows:

We all know that search engines can identify pages on a website via its internal (and external) linking structure. However, the most comprehensive and accessible method of providing our website structure to search engines by far is via a valid XML sitemap that is uploaded to a search engine's Webmaster Tools (for example, Google Webmaster Tools).

Naturally, the development team behind Magento realized that manually creating an XML sitemap from all the ever-changing pages, products, and category URLs would be an impossible task. Therefore, they developed their very own XML Sitemap Generator.

In order to generate our XML sitemap, we must first configure its contents. Go to System | Configuration | Google Sitemap and configure Frequency and Priority for our main page types. We can also configure how often we want to generate our sitemap.

Depending on our Magento store, we may decide that our categories are the most important pages. They're our most optimized pages and we want search engines to index them first. Our next most important pages would be our individual product pages; we want those to appear in search engines for customers searching specifically for our product names. The page type with the least priority would normally be our CMS pages.

The priority is simply a value that is passed to Google in order for it to prioritize the list of pages it will index; it will then (supposedly) do so programmatically.

Based upon our chosen SEO campaign, we would set the priority higher for those pages we are optimizing. Therefore, if we are optimizing our categories and products more than CMS pages (recommended) we would set their priorities to match the following:

In the end, we should have something that looks like this:

Our next step is to make sure that we have an XML sitemap that will be updated based on these settings. To do this, we need to first create one as follows:

This should generate an XML sitemap in our chosen path with our chosen filename. We can test this by visiting our path/filename in the URL, for example, http://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml.

Once we have confirmed that our XML sitemap is set up and working correctly, we now need to make sure that it has been submitted to our chosen search engine—Google.

There are two ways to do this, but for safety's sake, we would usually perform both:

SEO would be obsolete if there wasn't a way to analyze the flow of traffic onto (and through) our optimized website.

There are many analytics packages out there, but the most popular by far is Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/).

In order to set up Analytics effectively on our Magento store, we will need to enter our Google Analytics Account Number (tracking ID) in the administration panel. It is also recommended that we activate e-commerce tracking from within our Google Analytics account.

In order to do this, perform the following steps:

Now that we have set up analytics, we will find a whole plethora of information is now available to us, including the ability to track revenue by source and to work out our most effective conversion paths. We'll look at more advanced tracking methods in Chapter 6, Analyzing and Tracking Your Visitors.

To double-check that our website is calling out the Google Analytics JavaScript code, we can navigate to our home page and then, within the browser, view the page source. Just inside the <body> tag, we should find code similar to the following:

<!-- BEGIN GOOGLE ANALYTICS CODEs -->
// our <script> tag containing our tracking code here
<!-- END GOOGLE ANALYTICS CODE -->

If we do not see this code, it could be that the template file has been edited and the tag that includes our Google Analytics code has been removed. If this is the case, we should double-check our standard template files (1column.phtml, 2columns-left.phtml, 2columns-right.phtml, and 3columns.phtml, usually found within app/design/frontend/[package]/[theme]/template/page) to make sure that these two snippets of code are in place:

In this chapter, we learned how to effectively distribute our keywords across our Magento store, how we should optimize our different page types, and the pivotal role keyword relevance has on SEO.

We have also scratched the surface of default optimization techniques such as using title tags and meta tags and saw how the content of a website can affect search engine rankings. We'll be exploring these in greater detail in later chapters.

We have configured our Magento store to best protect our website against duplicate content issues using the canonical tag, ensuring that our product pages are restricted to a single URL.

Our website is now accessible to search engines and our XML sitemap has been generated and optimized for our content. Google Analytics has also been successfully integrated to better enable us to track and measure how well our website converts visits into sales.

In the next chapter, we will be looking at how to optimize our category and product pages in greater detail.