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.