All-In-One-Designer
SEO Handbook
Introduction
To increase the visibility of the e-store to potential buyers, there are some techniques
that a website admin can implement through the admin panel to enhance its ranking in
the search engine. In this book, we will discuss a set of tips necessary for optimizing
the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in Magento. This ensures that customers not
only find your store on the first page of search engines but they also find the right
pages too when they are searching for specific items. The systematic guide will make
it very easy for you to understand and use SEO to reap maximum benefits for your
website.
Why this e-book?
The majority of search engines users are more likely to click on one of the top 5
suggestions in the results pages (SERPS), so to take advantage of this and gain
visitors to your web site or customers to your online store you need to in the top
positions.
SEO is not only about search engines but good SEO practices improve the user
experience and usability of a web site.
SEO is good for the social promotion of your web site. People who find your web
site by searching Google or Yahoo are more likely to promote it on Facebook,
Twitter, Google+ or other social media channels.
SEO is important for the smooth running of a big web site. Web sites with more
than one author can benefit from SEO in a direct and indirect way. Their direct
benefit is increase in search engine traffic and their indirect benefit is having a
common framework (checklists) to use before publishing content on the site.
SEO can put you ahead of the competition. If two web sites are selling the same
thing, the search engine optimized web site is more likely to have more customers
and make more sales.
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URL Rewrites
Why URL rewrites?
URL rewriters are used to extract the main idea of the web page content in its URL in
order to clarify it for search engines and common people browsing your site.
Converting SEO-unfriendly URLs into SEO-friendly URLs leads to higher rankings in
search engines. Also such rewriting conveys clear and user friendly message for your
customer.
How to set-up URL rewrites?
Just go to Admin Panel > Catalog > URL Rewrite Management. Click on the Edit button
or just on its row in the table. This will display several settings as shown in the image
on the right.
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FIELD DESCRIPTION
Indicates the type of redirect to be made. The type cannot be
Type changed after the redirect is created. Options include: Category,
Product and Custom
The URL of the page that is to be redirected. Depending on your
Request Path configuration, the Request Path might include the .html suffix and
category.
The URL that points to the new or destination page. The Target Path
Target Path
can be a different CMS page, or the result of a search.
301 (permanent redirect) - it informs search engines that the URL
was permanently removed and they should stop indexing old
Redirect content.
302 (temporary redirect) - it indicates temporary movements and it
can be switched to the old content later.
No Redirect – If a customer clicks the old URL, the browser shows
the expected content and doesn’t redirect him to the new URL.
Description To add some description or notes regarding the rewrite. This field is
for reference and is not visible to customers.
Save After making all the changes, don’t forget to click the Save button.
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You can also add new URL Rewrite by clicking the tab to the right side and follow the
same process again.
Meta Tags
1. For CMS Pages
Once you’ve given each CMS page some decent
content go to
Admin Panel > CMS > Page > Select a Page or Click on
Add new page > Meta Data
FIELD DESCRIPTION
Meta keywords are words and phrases relevant to the product or
Keywords
page. You can keep them empty.
Meta description is a short description of the product or page.
Description Make sure it states what’s in the page people are clicking towards,
and that it gets their attention
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2. For Products
When you add/edit any product from backend, you can put Meta title, Meta keywords
and Meta description from ‘Meta Information’ tab in product edit page.
FIELD DESCRIPTION
This gives each page a unique title which is displayed at the
Meta Title top bar of a browser. It is also used as the title on a search
engine results page.
Meta keywords are words and phrases relevant to the
Meta Keywords
product or page.
Meta Description Meta description is a short description of the product or page.
Note : If Meta Title, Meta Keywords and Meta Description fields are empty for any
product, then in frontend, the product’s name is displayed as Meta Title & Meta Key-
words, and product’s description is displayed as Meta Description for the product.
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3. For Category
Magento gives you the ability to add the name of categories to path for product URL’s.
Because Magento doesn’t support this functionality very well – it creates duplicate
content issues and hence it is always advisable to disable it. To do this, go to
System > Configuration > Catalog > Search Engine Optimization > Use categories path
for product URL > No.
Now, to set the details for each category go to
Catalog > Manage Categories > Click on any Category
FIELD DESCRIPTION
Meta Description Put an attractive description here; Keep in mind that people will
see the description in the result listings of search engines.
Keep this empty to use the category name including parents
Page Title categories. When you customize it, the title will be exactly like
your input, without the parent category.
Try to keep a short but keyword rich URL. Removing stop words
URL Key
like “the”, “and”, “for” etc. is usually a good idea.
Try to keep a short but keyword rich URL. Removing stop words like “the”, “and”, “for”
etc. is usually a good idea.
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SEO friendly URLs
System > Configuration > General > Web > Search Engine Optimization > Yes
Your URLs are now SEO friendly.
Title Tag Prefix & Suffix
The Default Page icon, title, title prefix, title suffix, description and keywords can be set
from : Admin Panel > System > Configuration > General > Design > HTML Head
Default Title
Magento Commerce
Default Description
Default Description
Default Keywords
Magento, Varien, E-commerce
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Note : This is very useful. You might have often seen page title as ‘Magento
Commerce’ even if your site has a different title and name e.g. in logout page. This is
because the ‘Default Title’ from above settings is set as ‘Magento Commerce’. You
should change it to your site’s name.
Suffix for Product and
Category URLs
Stores > configuration > Catalog > Search Engine Optimization
For removing, make these fields blank (remove .html from both fields) Save Config and
Reindex and clear cache of your store. It’s done.
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Canonical tags for products
and categories
Why Canonical tags?
It is very common for duplicate pages to be inadvertently created on websites, especially
on ecommerce sites, but this could harm your Google rankings, which is where canonical
tags come in. Canonical tags are used to solve duplicate content issues. In eCommerce
canonical tags are mostly used to solve problems of duplicate product content and
avoid indexing of filtered category pages. The good news is that canonical tags can be
added to pages to tell Google which is the preferred page that you want to rank for.
How?
You can enable canonical for Catalogue or Product tags in Admin Panel > System >
Configuration > Catalogue / Product > Search Engine Optimization
To index only pages that has a
full category path:
Set ‘Use Canonical Link Meta
Tag for Categories’ to ‘Yes’
Set ‘Use Canonical Link Meta
Tag for Products’ to ‘No
To index only product pages:
Set ‘Use Canonical Link Meta
Tag for Categories’ to ‘No’
Set ‘Use Canonical Link Meta
Tag for Products’ to ‘Yes’
When complete, click the ‘Save Config’ button.
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Category Path in Product URLs
These category paths are good for indexing and clearly show the logic of store
navigation. There are a few scenarios of using this setting in combination with
canonical tags:
You can choose not to add a category path to a product URL. In this case there
won’t be any threats of potential duplicates.
If you add category paths to product pages addresses and don’t enable
canonicals, you might face duplicate content issues.
If both category paths and product canonicals are enabled, each product page will
have a canonical pointing to itself without any category indication. Concurrently,
each product URL will have a category path in its address and be accessible from
all the categories you’ve added it to.
Control of Site Indexing
1.Robots.txt
Why?
Robots.txt will help prevent duplicate content issue, one of the primary things for SEO
success. It also helps you to hide technical details about your site i.e. Error logs, SVN
files, wanted directories etc. Since, these are prevented by Robots.txt you are left with
clean URLs to be indexed in search engines.
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How to setup?
Download the robots.text file first (there are a lot of sources available). Even
creating Robots.txt is super simple since it’s nothing but a text file and can be
created using any text editors like dream weaver, notepad, vim or your favourite
code editor.
Once you have created Robots.txt file it is supposed to reside at root of your site.
For an example if your store domain is www.mystore.com you should put
robots.txt file under the domain root where you also have app directory. So it sits
and accessed like www.mystore.com/robots.txt. Please note that many search
engines look for Robots.txt file directly under your store root and not under a
directory. So keeping this file under any directory, sub-directory is not wise.
2. Meta robots.txt
The Meta Robots.txt Extension provides
the ability to set Meta robots.txt values for
any URL, module, controller, action or
parameter. For many browse pages in
Magento like heckout, customer account,
or pages with parameters (like filtered
category), you may not want a search
engine to index them.
But you would still want search engines to follow links to category, product pages.
COMBINATION DESCRIPTION
Means that you “tell” search engine robots.txt to index the
INDEX, FOLLOW certain site content and then come back and check for changes
later.
Means that you “tell” search engine robots not to index the
NOINDEX, FOLLOW
certain site content, but come back and check for changes later.
Means that you “tell” search engine robots to index the certain
INDEX, NOFOLLOW site content only once and don’t come back and check for
changes later.
NOINDEX, Means that you “tell” search engine robots not to index the
NOFOLLOW certain site content and don’t come back and check for
changes later.
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XML Site Map
To add a new sitemap, you will first need to create a /sitemap directory in your web
root directory with writable permissions so that you can generate and save to that
location.(http://www.example.co.in/sitemap/sitemap.xml or similar)
Then go to
Catalog > Google Sitemap >
Add Sitemap
FIELD DESCRIPTION
Filename Enter: ‘sitemap.xml’
Path Enter the path to a writable location on your server.
To put the sitemap in a folder, enter the path to the folder:
/sitemaps
To put the sitemap at the base path of your store, enter a
forward slash: /
Store View Set Store View to the view where the sitemap will be used.
Save and Generate Click to save and publish the Sitemap
To ‘refresh’ your sitemap at regular intervals, go to System > Configuration > Catalog >
Google Sitemap > Generation Settings. Set to yes and create in the early hours of the
morning.
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To provide your sitemap to the search engines, you can link to it from your robots.txt
file, which you should find in your web root directory
(e.g. http://www.example.co.nz/robots.txt).
You should also register your sitemap manually with the Google and Microsoft:
Google Webmaster Tools: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Bing Webmaster Tools: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/
Other SEO aspects
1. Micro Data or Rich Snippets
Why?
Quicker Website Indexation
CTR (Click Through Rate) Increase
Standout in Organic Search
More Qualified Traffic
Rank Higher in Search Results
Lower Bounce Rate
How?
You will probably need to use an extension module. There are lots of options for the
Rich Snippets but below are the most important ones:
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Organizations URL + name + logo
Description The main information about the product
Breadcrumbs Navigation path
SKU The unique identifier of the product
Brand The product’s producer
Reviews Rating + number of reviews
Product Price + availability + currency
You can see the use of these rich snippets in the example below:
Before
After
2. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free Google service which allows the webmasters and web site
administrators to monitor their web sites' traffic and conversion ratio. Magento
supports two types of tracking:
Page View Tracking E-commerce Tracking
Lists the origin from which your web store Lists the customers that make
visitors linked to your store. purchases and what they buy.
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First you need to sign up at http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html.
You will receive a Google Analytics account number. Write it down since you will need it
for the Magento configuration.
System > Configuration > Sales > Google API and expand the Google Analytics
section.
Pick the Yes option from the Enable drop-down menu. Enter the Google Analytics
account number in the Account number field and click on the Save Config button. The
Google Analytics code is now added to your site.
3. Google Adwords
If you use Google Adwords advertising for your Magento web store, you will probably
need to use an extension module because Magento doesn’t have functionality for
tracking Adwords conversion. For that you first need to access the Google website, and
create your own new account on Google Adwords.
Admin Panel > Stores > Settings >
Configuration > Sales > Google API >
Google Adwords
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FIELD DESCRIPTION
Enable Enable by choosing Yes
Conversion ID Fill your Google Adwords ID
Conversion
Choose the language that is defined in your Google Adwords script.
Language
Conversion Format Fill the number that is taken from your Google AdWords script.
Conversion Color Fill the hexa-decimal value from your Google AdWords script.
Conversion Label Fill the text string from your Google AdWords script.
Conversion Value Set to a dynamic variable based on the Total Cost of sales.
4. Blog
Magento eCommerce Blog functionality is not included by default. However, it is very
easy to setup a blog in Magento store. You will need to use a custom Magento module
for it. You can find many modules that will adequately suit your needs. After the
successful installation, you will find blog section in the top menu of Magento Admin
Panel. From there you can quickly adjust the newly installed blog settings, add blog
posts, manage blog’s content, etc.
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Questions?
Your print storefront deserves all the queries related to success of your web-to-print
business be addressed. We've got a team of friendly e-commerce experts ready to
answer them! We love to help you grow your business. Happy to be a resource.
Email Visit Contact
[email protected] www.designnbuy.com +1-347-647-9799
Know More...
Now that you have gained insights about setting up the SEO of your storefront, you can
learn about the Promotions of the storefront in the next e-book of this series from our
website.
You can even lean about the Web-to-Print from the links below:
A Guide for Promoting Your Online Printing Business
Tips for On-boarding customers at your Web-to-Print store
Printed Promotional Products Industry in detail
How to increase average order value on your print storefront? (Webinar)
Turn your one-time-only customer to lifetime fans, tips from experts
Success Secrets of Online Printing Businesses
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