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Magento Search Engine Optimization
Magento Search Engine Optimization

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.

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Magento Search Engine Optimization

Chapter 2. Product and Category Page Optimization

In the previous chapter, we touched upon the importance of category pages for keyword distribution. Generally speaking, category pages are perfect to optimize "broader" search phrases as the names and content of our categories tend to automatically relate with those types of phrases.

For example, if we were optimizing for "Wooden Dining Chairs" and we had a wooden dining chairs category, it would make sense to use it to optimize this keyword rather than create a separate landing page. The category page is the most obvious place for users to look for "Wooden Dining Chairs".

Within this chapter, we will be looking at how to best format category pages for both visitors and search engines. We'll also be looking at optimizing our product pages to bring better conversions through our website and how to improve their appearance in the SERPs (search engine result pages).

In this chapter, we will be learning how to:

  • Edit our title, meta description, and...

Optimizing titles and descriptions for the SERPs


Adjusting Page Title and Meta Description are the easiest and most obvious optimization improvements we can make to our category and product pages.

As mentioned previously, the role of the Page Title and Meta Description fields is to represent our page in the SERPs.

Although Page Title certainly plays a role in search engine ranking factors, Meta Description is deemed to be of far less value when it comes to ranking websites. What is clear however is that, when displayed in the SERPs, both of these elements play vital roles in advertising our page.

When optimizing our page titles and descriptions, the main questions we should be asking ourselves are:

  • Is this relevant to the page?

  • Is it descriptive of the content and the search intent of the user?

The common problem when incorporating keywords into page titles and descriptions is that, if we're not careful, it's all too easy to lose relevance.

Firstly, let's consider page titles. The general rules...

Optimizing our URL keys


The other obvious element on a search engine's results page, besides the title and description (and other schema implementations, which we'll move onto in a moment), is the page URL.

The general consensus within the SEO community is that URL keys should be relevant to our destination page, in lowercase, and simple for the user to interpret.

By default, Magento will try to set our URL key as our product or category name followed by our chosen file extension. For SEO purposes, this is perfectly acceptable, and we wouldn't want to change these from their defaults too much.

As covered in the previous chapter, we would simply want to make sure that our URLs are as clean and simple as possible by performing simple tasks such as:

  • Removing the index.php file from our URLs

  • Using our canonical URL for products (www.mydomain.com/my-product-url.html)

URLs should be user-friendly wherever possible—this means short and descriptive of the content. A shorter URL is also more likely to...

Layout and content considerations


When optimizing the content on our pages, we must always make sure that the primary purpose of our content is to engage our visitors—not pander directly to search engines. The more beneficial our page is to our users, the greater the chance that search engines will want to present our page to its own users.

Well-structured category and product pages are essential for any e-commerce website. The ease in which a customer can browse the website and add a product to the cart is fundamental in making sure that our store converts visits into sales.

This is normally dependent on the layout of the website and not only affects our conversion rates, but also visitor bounce rates and time on page, which are both important ranking factors for SEO.

Category page layout

For categories, Magento provides us with the following default tools in which to display content to the user:

  • The ability to add a category description, image, and thumbnail

  • The ability to display a static block...

Optimizing images and selling your product


The most frustrating aspect of running an online store is that it's physically impossible to personally pitch our product to each and every e-commerce visitor. It is therefore crucial that our product page contains as much persuasive material and useful information as possible.

One of the simplest and most beneficial ways to get across the sheer quality of our product is through good product photography.

The following are a few guidelines on how best to go about adding product photography to the product page:

  • The main product image should be large—at least 25 percent of the main content column width

  • The image should be of high quality and an option for the user to zoom-in or expand the image should be provided

  • The image should be in context (for example, a wooden dining chair should be situated on the floor next to a dining table, not floating in space)

  • If you provide multiple color choices, or your product comes bundled with accessories, provide an image...

Implementing schema (rich snippets)


When visitors browse our website, they instinctively understand the meaning behind certain elements on the page. They understand when they are viewing a product page, reading reviews of our product, and even understand the difference between our recommended retail price (RRP) and our special price simply due to the layout of the page and how we have styled those elements.

Although search engines are becoming smarter every year, we can't rely on them to instinctively pinpoint the exact locations of these elements on our page. Microdata introduced with HTML5 helps to specify these elements for major search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo!.

Note

There are a number of different canonical tag vocabularies on the Internet that are compatible with major search engines. For e-commerce, one of the better vocabularies is called Good Relations, and is well worth taking a look at goo.gl/4R96K9.

The main reason why we would want to implement the schema.org structured...

Implementing social sharing for products


The main aim when using social sharing buttons on a website is to allow visitors the option of sharing our page/website within their own social circle. In turn, this would lead to the possibility of other like-minded web users being made aware of and possibly visiting our website.

As shown in the preceding section, there is evidence to suggest social shares (or signals) are becoming a search engine ranking factor. The number of social shares being representative of a vote for our web page is similar to how links are treated by search engines currently.

Note

For more information on search engine ranking factors, please see the following link (moz.com): goo.gl/Rz171o.

There have been mixed opinions on whether or not social widgets are applicable to product pages; however, due to the release of product-specific social tags, such as Twitter product cards and Open Graph, the relevance is now clear.

With these two simple implementations, it's now easy to add...

Summary


In this chapter, we have covered a lot of factors that govern how well our product and category pages can be optimized. We've looked at the general rules for setting up our page titles, descriptions, and layout, and how these differ between categories and products. We've also seen that there are many other ranking factors besides meta information that govern how high a page ranks in the SERPs.

With a few simple lines of code, it is really easy to implement product schema and social elements such as Twitter cards into our Magento templates. This is highly recommended for any e-commerce store—especially when we have enabled our reviews and ratings that help to increase our CTR within the SERPs.

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Table of Contents

8 Chapters
Preparing and Configuring Your Magento Website Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Product and Category Page Optimization Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Managing Internationalization and Multiple Languages Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Template/Design Adjustments for SEO and CRO Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Speeding Up Your Magento Website Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Analyzing and Tracking Your Visitors Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Technical Rewrites for Search Engines Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Purpose-built Magento Extensions for SEO/CRO Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon 4.7
(3 Ratings)
5 star 66.7%
4 star 33.3%
3 star 0%
2 star 0%
1 star 0%
Noah Apr 16, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I read this book to get familiar with the must-do for on-site SEOfor our new Magento CE store. The book is full of practical advise. Very well organized.Very well written. Excellent for anyone in charged of SEO optimizing a Magento store.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Lewis Sellers Apr 01, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Creare Communications are always very active in the community when it comes to Magento search engine optimisation and how to optimise your store. Magento is a hugely complex system with lots of menus and settings hidden away. The book that Robert has written will guide a user through all of the steps you need to correctly carry out the on-site optimisation aspect of your campaign.This book talks through the technical aspects of Magento and how to get the best out of optimising your product, category layouts, adding schema markup and the importance of different aspects of SEO. Moving further into the book, you'll learn how to optimise your Magento page speed, implement canonical URLs, remove unwanted blocks and using advanced segments and filters within Google Analytics.Packt Publishing regularly put together series of books and they always do a brilliant job of organising them and make sure they're easy to follow. A great book for someone looking to get started with SEO or looking to launch an eCommerce store on the Magento platform. As a fellow digital agency, we can vouch for the quality of this book!
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Jack Jul 30, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
Un testo (in inglese) che riporta i passaggi essenziali per l'ottimizzazione di un e-commerce su piattaforma Magento.Sono anche indicati plus-in e risorse utili.Un po' sintetico nel trattare alcuni argomenti, per i miei gusti.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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