Magento SEO Tips for On-site Optimisation

Here are some Magento SEO tips that will help you make use of the inbuilt tools Magento has available to maximise your chances of getting found. There are also and a few extra tricks to be found along the way…

Meta Robots Tag

Make sure your Magento website is visible to search engines and their spiders/robots. This basically involves using the HTML code: <meta name=”robots” content=”INDEX,FOLLOW” />. If you go to System > Configuration, and then go to the Design Tab and navigate to the Default Robots field, and set it to INDEX,FOLLOW, that should alter the header of every page on your website.

Magento Page Content

Another Magento SEO tip is to make sure your Magento category pages and content pages are optimised and include relevant search terms. Each page title and description should be unique to reduce duplicated content on your website.

Content Pages

Simply go to CMS > Pages > Manage Content and choose the page you wish to optimise. Here you can optimise the page title in Page Information and the Meta Data, and URL. Google only looks at the first 68 characters in the page title and approximately first 155 characters in the Meta description.

Category Pages

Catalogue > Categories > Manage Categories will take you to the categories page, and will allow you to edit the page title, Meta description and Meta keywords of each. Here you can also edit the description of each category.

Category descriptions (visible on-site) are a great way of getting some important keyword terms onto the category pages of your website, which you can then target when link building, by linking using those terms as anchor text.

Optimising category pages is much better practice then targeting your website’s homepage for all your search terms, as they allow you to target the specific terms related to that category more so than trying to cram every single search term into your homepage’s content.

Default Meta Tags

Go to System > Configuration, and then go to the Design Tab and navigate to the HTML Head section. Here you can set the default Meta data and Meta keywords for all pages on your site. Not as good as tailored Meta data, but this is a good default rule of thumb when lots of products are being added and there’s no time to optimise each one – at least there will be a optimised set of data per page, rather than none.

Google Sitemap in Magento

Magento has its own Google XML sitemap generation tool: System > Configuration, and then go to the Google Sitemap tab. Here you can customise pretty much anything sitemap related, including how often the sitemap.xml should be updated, at what time during the day.

Why have a sitemap? Sitemaps are an important way of communicating with search engines. While in robots.txt you tell search engines which parts of your site to exclude from indexing, in your sitemap you tell search engines where you’d like them to go.

Magento Canonical Link Tool

This tool is useful for reducing duplicate content issues. This Magento SEO plug-in, accessible via the Magento Connect facility, tackles the problem of many products being placed in many categories. This creates exact copies of the page on several different URLs, all of which may well be found by search engines, who then deem it as duplicate content.

The canonical link elements plug-in tells search engines to treat every product page as if it lived in the root category (i.e. does not count the category page as part of the directory). For example the product found at:
{code type=html}

http://www.fun4kids.co.uk/scooters/electric-scooter/rocket/rocket-electric-escooter-scooter-e10-24v.html

{/code}
Would be shortened to:
{code type=html}

http://www.fun4kids.co.uk/rocket-electric-escooter-scooter-e10-24v.html

{/code}
Using the code:

{code type=html}

{/code}
When being spidered, and therefore would not be spidered multiple times in different categories.

Reference::: thepixel.com