Optimizing a Magento website can be rather tricky at times, especially when we try to figure out how best to optimize a specific phrase on a particular page while we navigate over 15,000 files and hundreds of different configuration settings.
It can sometimes seem a little daunting, but thankfully, it's not all that bad.
Magento has been built by people who have as much passion about your website as they do about their own software, and as such, they are always looking to improve the internal optimization of their platform.
They've already provided us with a variety of tools that we can use to better prepare our Magento store for search engines. Not only this, but due to the open source nature of the Magento platform, there exists a growing community of developers and SEO specialists who constantly innovate and experiment with different ways to improve the framework.
Like any good e-commerce content management system, Magento allows us to adjust certain elements of each product, category, and CMS page features such as titles, meta information, and headings. Magento is rather good at delivering these simple SEO requirements.
It has, however, its SEO shortcomings, and this book will teach you how to tackle some of the most common issues that may arise.
I hope that with this book, you'll be able to make use of all the tools Magento has provided for you as well as implement some of the more advanced SEO techniques. You should also be able to repair several of those unfortunate SEO flaws that are, to be fair, inherent within almost all large open source frameworks.
The primary goal of optimizing our Magento website—and one that we must always keep at the forefront of our minds—is to enhance the experience for both our customers and search engines.
A better experience for both will give us the best possible chance of increasing our number of visitors, converting those visitors into customers, and boosting the overall sales figures for our Magento website.
Chapter 1, Preparing and Configuring Your Magento Website, covers the basic concepts of keyword placement, the roles of the different types of pages, XML sitemap creation, and integrating Google Analytics e-commerce tracking. It also covers the category structure and the default configuration aspects, such as setting up canonical elements, default meta information, and URL structure.
Chapter 2, Product and Category Page Optimization, focuses on optimizing our product and category pages and implementing the best practices for elements such as headings, titles, meta information, URL keys, and body content. Page layout, schema integration, and social sharing will also be covered.
Chapter 3, Managing Internationalization and Multiple Languages, looks at the best practices for domain structure, store-specific configuration and translation, as well as methods to avoid duplicate content across our multinational store views.
Chapter 4, Template/Design Adjustments for SEO and CRO, will cover template manipulation in order to better deliver a clear, organized heading structure as well as how to optimize pagination, product reviews, and the entire checkout experience. It will also cover implementing website-specific microdata, such as breadcrumb and organization schema.
Chapter 5, Speeding Up Your Magento Website, will look into why speed is such an important factor for both usability and SEO. It will lead on to show you how it's possible to improve the performance through Magento configuration, server compression, and advanced caching techniques, such as Varnish, for scalability.
Chapter 6, Analyzing and Tracking Your Visitors, provides an overview of the features available with Google Analytics to track e-commerce conversions. It also covers ways to better interpret our results using filters, advanced segments, and multi-channel funnels.
Chapter 7, Technical Rewrites for Search Engines, shows the various methods available to you in order to fix many URL-related problems that occur within the Magento framework using 301 redirects, URL rewrites, and blocking access to search engines for certain areas using the robots.txt file.
Chapter 8, Purpose-built Magento Extensions for SEO/CRO, looks at some of the best SEO- and CRO-related extensions that are available for free and for a price.
Administrator-level access to a Magento installation is required as well as FTP access in order to edit certain files. This book uses Magento Community Edition 1.8.0.0 as a reference, but most of the content is also applicable to older versions of both the Community and Enterprise editions. It is also recommended that a valid Google account be set up in order to correctly configure both Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools..
This book is highly suited to both Magento developers with an understanding of SEO and on-page SEO specialists who wish to learn more about the possibilities (and limitations) that exist within the Magento platform.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
A block of code is set as follows:
<title>Open Source Ecommerce Software & Solutions | Magento</title> <meta name="description" content="Download the Magento Community Edition, our free open source ecommerce software solution for expert developers and enthusiasts!" />
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <url> <loc>http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac</loc> <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac" /> <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-ae" href="http://store.apple.com/ae/browse/home/shop_mac" /> <!—- another 40 combinations for this url not shown -->
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Navigate to Catalog | Manage Categories".
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