Magento SEO

With the open source e-commerce platform Magento, online stores can be set up flexibly and user-friendly. The system already has a good SEO functionality out of the box, which we will briefly introduce below. The on-board tools for search engine optimization can be found in the basic configurations and in the template settings. Furthermore, the SEO performance and conversion rate can be increased with additional modules and measures.

One of the basic SEO functions of Magento is the generation of search engine friendly URLs. The function can be set in the backend in the configuration menu: Under the item "Web > Search Engine Optimization" URL Rewrite must be activated. In the URL options, "Add StoreCode to URLs" should be set to "no". The menu items "safe" and "unsafe" are used to store the BaseURL, but only a preference for www or non-www URLs is set. Only a 301 redirect in the .htaccess solves the problem and at the same time prevents session IDs from being appended to the URLs. Add the following code to the file for this purpose:  

1. RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /index.php HTTP/ 

2. RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.myshopdomain.com/ [R=301,L]  
   

The next step is to change the header settings. Instead of the default title "Magento Commerce", enter a meaningful title with relevant keywords in the "Design > HTML Header" menu. The fields for "Title Suffix", "Default Description" and "Default Keywords" remain empty. The metadata can be entered in Magento's CMS module for the pages that are to rank. Last but not least, the item "Use category path for product URLs" must be deactivated in the configuration menu under "Catalog > Search Engine Optimization". For category management, enter a good meta description and URL description. The page title remains empty. The product pages will be optimized in the same way. Extra traffic from image search engines can be skimmed by setting title and alt tags for the images.

The templates contain the Magento logo as H1 by default. However, this heading format should be reserved for the content, i.e. the category or product name. The logo can appear as H3. Since the use of headings in the templates is excessive, we change H4 tags to Strong tags. We rededicate H3 product names to H1. The templates are also overloaded with CSS and Javascript, so a little cleanup is needed here. The code is simply swapped out to external files. This keeps the template clean and reduces the loading times of the store pages. Activating the cache functions under "System > Cache management" also brings a speed boost. In addition, the host and server configuration should of course be optimally set.

There are a number of good extensions for Magento that help to tickle every last bit of search engine optimization out of the system. The diva-e Magento experts offer you solutions that, among other things, provide a remedy for the annoying duplicate content problem. In e-shops, the same content can naturally be found under different URLs, for example on category and product pages. With Magento SEO Extensions, Canonical tags and the rel= "next" and rel= "prev" tags quickly and easily eliminate this problem. Furthermore, better indexing can be achieved with the nofollow attribute and the solutions simplify the optimization of XML and HTML sitemaps.