Some of you who work with Magento for a long time might think that this topic is so clear that it doesn’t need to have an article. We get many inquiries to finalize the work somebody already started. One of the things we notice is that some developers tend to embed the Google Analytics code directly in the Magento theme files. Yes, it works and you will see the standard traffic data in the Google Analytics interface, but it is not a way to go.

In most of the cases, those developers edit footer.phtml in app/design/frontend/default/[your_theme]/template/page/html folder. As I said, the Google Analytics will track visitors data properly, but the main issue is that the eCommerce data will not be collected. To enable eCommerce data to be visible, first step is that you let Google Analytics to know that the profile is actually an E-Commerce site.

You will get to this interface by

1. Logging to Google Analytics
2. Select an account for this site
3. On the list of Account profiles, do not go to the reports, click on Edit instead
4. On the first box “Main Website Profile Information”, there is another Edit link to the right. Click on it.
5. One there, you will see the interface similar to the one on this image. Let Google Analytics know this is an eCommerce website
   

Although Google Analytics will tell you to embed the javascript code on your website, you don’t have to do that. You just need to see what is the Web Property ID of the profile. One you know it, go to the Magento administration to the interface: System> Configuration> Google API> Google Analytics. Enable it and insert that Web Property ID. Viola.

Forums say that older versions of Magento before 1.2 do not properly track eCommerce data. In case you have older version of Magento and have this issue, do not install some special plugins. Upgrade Magento instead.

By Tomislav Bilic from Inchoo.net

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1. Manual creation of Google Sitemap in Magento
2. Magento SEO (search engine friendly Magento shopping cart)
3. Magento SEO Development

Magento SEO Theme

We start off with using the Blank SEO Theme, which takes the blank theme (which we’d typically start from) and improves some items with more semantic coding, cleaning the header, and some no-following. We also go through the already detailed steps of:

• re-routing non www traffic to www
• 301ing /index.php to the root
• implement canonical URL extension
• generate XML sitemap

At this point, there are a few other recommended changes we make to the base theme that haven’t yet been detailed.  First, we remove the table-based layout for the product grid, we prefer using div blocks to organize our products and allows for cleaner code.  We also make a few changes to the semantics of the header tags actually used in that theme.  I’ve seen many SEOs do the same thing, they make the logo an h1 tag, title it with some keyphrases, and use it on every page of the site.  While this may semantically help keep your site structured, my opinion is that you’re doing yourself a dis-service by practicing this technique.  The h1 tag should be unique on every page, and should only be used when providing value to the user.  The blank SEO theme makes the logo an h1 on the homepage, and an h4 on all subsequent pages.  Which in itself is a comprimise, but does break the semantics of the page, because on subsequent pages, the h4 appears before the h1.  If you do not have a “natural heading” on the homepage, I might recommend wrapping the logo in one there and only there, but if you do, then, there is no purposed for the logo being wrapped in an h1.

In addition to this, we also go through and no-follow layered navigation links, sorting and paging links, wishlist, compare, as well as any other necessary links.

Magento Pagination

We wrote up a pretty exhaustive article on the issues of eCommerce pagination and a few methods to remedy any duplicate content issues that may arise from that.  Like most other eCommerce platforms, Magento’s pagination techniques presents the same set of issues.  Without redeveloping the entire pagination system (not yet at least), we make a few tweaks to how the existing pagination works in two primary ways.  First, we alter the title tag of each page to prefix “Page [2] of…” so that each page contains a unique title tag.  In addition, you may not even notice it, but there is actually a duplicate URL for your first page.  Follow me in this process, browse to a category with multiple pages, advance to any page greater than one, and notice the link back to page 1 – it appends a querystring parameter for page one instead of using the default URL.  For example, if we sell blue acorns (goodbye blue widgets), our page URL might be /products/blue-acorns where each subsequent page being /products/blue-acorns?p=2, the pagination actually links back to page one as /products/blue-acorns?p=1 – creating an exact duplicate of /products/blue-acorns.  We resolve this by adding a nofollow attribute to the page 1 link.  An even better solution would be to change the pagination model so that it does not use the p=1 querystring parameter.

SEO for multi-store Magento implementations

One of the great capabilities of Magento is its inherit ability to support multiple web stores. Through one administration and one interface, you can manage all of your orders, all of your products, everything.  Many online retailers setup multiple niche storefronts that may sell overlapping products, and Magento provides an excellent interface for doing so.  However, be careful in how you setup your product data.  If you sell the same products on multiple sites, and use the same exact information on each site, you’re walking a fine line between duplicating yourself, especially seeing that all of your multiple sites will most likely be setup on the same IP block depending on your host.  So it would be easy for a search engine to tell that these sites are not only related, but really, one in the same.

This is more of a tip for those of you running multiple sites on Magento than it is a Magento-specific tweak, but I highly recommend mixing up the data on each site.  Don’t use the same titles, headers, and descriptions and even price on each site.  I realize this takes a great deal of effort to maintain, but if the whole reason to run multiple sites is an attempt to achieve greater “reach” in the search engines, you’d be shooting yourself in the foot if you just used the same data on each site.  You’d be better off building up the authority of one single domain than setting up multiple sites and hindering each of them.

301ing disabled products

Consider this scenario.  You sell a great, useful amazing product, everyone loves it.  They love it so much that the product goes viral and you’ve got thousands of inbound links to it.  A year later, the product is no longer available, and you disable it from your website.  What then happens to users that click on those links?  What happens to search engines the next time they spider your site?  What happens to all that link juice being passed to that page?  The answer to all of the above is… 404

This is a pretty common issue we come across with eCommerce platforms, when products are disabled, and a user tries to go to that now defunct URL, they get a 404 error.  While we do recommend customizing your “not found” pages to at least include a search or related pages, what would be more effective from an SEO perspective, and a user’s perspective is if they got directed to another page that was related to the product that is no longer available.  What we do is actually create a means for which Magento administrators can setup a “redirect to” product (or category) so that when a product is disabled, instead of the user (or search engine) getting a 404, they actually get taken to a product that might have replaced it, a related product, or even the parent category if you no longer carry that product.  This will help retain any search engine positioning that product was getting, preserve any link juice that was being passed to that page, as well as creating a better user experience.  A win all the way around.

SEO and eCommerce Platforms

All in all, while you might be thinking to yourself, “wow, Magento really isn’t SEO friendly” – don’t let this article confuse you.  Magento IS search engine friendly, just as much as the next eCommerce platform.  The reality is, almost all eCommerce platforms we work with have the same issues.  And when it comes down to it, the platform itself only does so much for you.  A search engine optimizer needs a platform that allows them to have the freedom to exercise on-site optimization, and Magento does just that.  The biggest sales pitch by eCommerce platforms right now is that they are “the most SEO friendly” – yet I’ve yet to come across one that stands out any more than the rest.  In reality, most platforms have matured to the point that the tools needed to manage an SEO friendly site is all (or mostly) there, and there are only minor variances that separate one from the next.  But we’ll save that discussion for another time.

Related posts:

1. Magento eCommerce Customization, Custom Design Development
2. Changing Product Tabs from JavaScript to CSS
3. SEO for Magento Web Sites

Magento SEO Update 2/11/2009: More activity with SEO and Magento, with some SEO developers trying to make a name for themselves in the Magento space. See below.

Magento SEO Update 11/4/2008: Magento SEO is actively evolving, and SEO links (SEO resources for those working with Magento ecommerce) are now listed down below.

It’s never too early to be looking at SEO aspects of Magento, the new Open Source commerce application (shopping cart). Theyare still in beta but quite advanced, and search engine friendly issues have been addressed a few times in the Magento SEO forum, and in the “SEO group” and on the Magento site. There’s a video clip from November describing the rewrite system as very flexible, because in SEO, “every seo has his own opinion”.

Much of the SEO discussion is very basic, and there is pitifully low activity on real SEO. Someone on the China magneto forum posted a spider view back in November, before the latest SEO friendliness was incorporated. There is more SEO discussion in China than on the main site as well. However, the framework is quite capable and the meta tag management is as I would expect it to be for a modern, flexible PHP framework.

Maybe it’s time to dig in and flex the SEO friendliness and Magento’s “built in flexibility”?

I’d like to connect with anyone else looking into Magento and SEO, or anyone attempting effective deployment of Magento at this stage (non-production assumed) with respect to search marketing. The online demo site is not looking so good, but given the level of SEO discussion so far I didn’t expect it to be optimized. That said, this Chinese demo is not looking so good either, and they did have a bit more Magento SEO discussions.

Magento SEO Resources

Still plenty of misunderstanding of SEO issues in the Magento community and here. and here.

Some SEO advice is appearing, even though it is brute-force also see here and here.

There is some SEO awareness showing up on the Magento template design forums and even early signs of web sites dedicated to optimizing Magento for search engines.

BlueAcorn has published a good blog post about SEO and Magento, paying attention to the strategic issues that I find matter most when considering search marketing. Their ecommerce experience shows, as this kind of post is much better than the typical “SEO for Magento” blog post.
This is funny. I’ve been watching Google struggle with the new term “Magento” for almost a year. It seems there is enough mis-typing of comic book character Magneto (the freak who can manipulate magnetic fields) in the corpus Google indexes, that Google assigned Magento as a synonym of Magneto (do a Google search with ~Magento and you’ll see it).  Even to this day Magento hasn’t defined itself enough in the world to overpower the Magneto typos!

Wordpress SEO promotor Joost DeValk  is moving into the Magento space now with a canonicalization extension he specified, putting his Yoast brand onto it. He didn’t write it, and it isn’t perfect, but he’s apparently collaborating with a PHP coder comfortable with Magento. Joost told me the coder will be guest blogging for him with more Magento code in the future. This initial code was prepared with some advance awareness of the new canonical tag sponsored by search engines, and is already listed in the MagentoConnect system under SEO.

Related posts:

1. What is the best shopping cart?
2. Magento Search Engine Optimization Techniques
3. Magento SEO Development

Magento Ecommerce and it’s community is quickly growing. One of the concerns of many Magento users and general web shop owners are SEO. Although Magento is already very SEO friendly when installed, there are a lot of things that can still need to improve upon it. Semaphore SEO Team have researched and discovered a lot techniques to optimize Magento Platform based website.

Some Tips to Optimize Magento Based Website.

• By default your Magento install the title “Magento Commerce”. To make it Search Engine Friendly you need to use keywords in your title because search engine put more weight on your title of your magento shop as well as the description too. To make the changes into default title “Magento Commerce”Go to Configuration Tab => Design => HTML Head. Create a good and descriptive title for your website with your related keyword of your products. This title will be used for several non-content pages also without custom title, e.g. “About Us”, “Contact Us” and the “Popular Search Terms”.

• Also for your category pages you need to do some changes into your website configuration

• For Category go to System => Configuration => Catalog => Search Engine Optimization and set “Use categories path for product URL’s to “no”.

• To set the details for each category. Go to Catalog => Manage Categories.

• The most important fields are: Meta Description, Page Title, URL Key

Related posts:

1. How to do basic technical SEO for Magento
2. Magento SEO (search engine friendly Magento shopping cart)
3. SEO for Magento Web Sites

Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform which has many advanced features and is arguably one of the most adaptable e-commerce platforms available and incorporates many SEO features. The approach for optimising an e-commerce site is broadly the same as that for any other web site however there are a few caveats.

Titles and Meta Information

These days many e-commerce platforms allow you have friendly URLs, unique titles, meta information and so on. Even when these items are not available, plug-ins have been developed to add these functionalities. In Magento titles and meta information can be added when adding products.

Content

Creating good quality content is still the key. Avoid using manufacturers descriptions. Images are important in e-commerce sites. As the search engines cannot index the content of images, it is important to use the alt and title attributes of the img tag to add useful descriptive content. Use of headings and subheadings for products types and judicious use of the keywords are all important. Instead of the product code,  include more generic keywords after product names. For example on a page about HP colour laser printers, Instead of HP 2700  this could be HP 2700 Color LaserJet Printer.

Search Engine Friendly URLs

Search engine friendly URLs are found in the system settings. Remember to refresh the cache in order to see these working.

Content Duplication

One of the greatest problems with these packages is their ability to display the same page in different categories and also  by category, price, etc. This can lead to, non-malacious duplicate content issues. Ideally, one would like to make the site a one-to-one mapping of URLs to pages. How can this be achieved?

Currently, there is a problem with the way in which the URLs are rewritten and duplicate content can occur in many ways.

One temporary solution is to simply stop the search engines from indexing the pages that are likely to cause problems. Copy and paste this code into a robots.txt and upload it to the root directory of the Magento install.

Related posts:

1. Magento Search Engine Optimization Techniques
2. How to do basic technical SEO for Magento
3. Magento SEO (search engine friendly Magento shopping cart)

Magento is one of the most search engine friendly e-commerce platforms straight out of the box, but there are several known issues that can be taken care of to optimize your Magento SEO. The first step is to get the most recent release. Then, to get started, enable Server URL rewrites. You will find this setting under System => Configuration => Web => Search Engines Optimization. Another good thing to configure now you are on this screen is “Add store Code to Urls” under “Url Options”. In most cases it is better to set this functionality to “No”.

1.1. WWW vs non-WWW

Under “Unsecure” and “Secure” you can find the Base URL, where you can set the preferred domain. You can choose between the www and the non-www version of the URL. With changing the setting you don’t create a redirect from www to non-www or non-www to www but set only the preferred one. Therefore it is a good idea to create a 301 redirect through .htaccess with mod_rewrite. When editing the .htaccess file you can add the following code to redirect index.php to root.
Around line 119:


RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /index.php HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.mydomain.com/ [R=301,L]


Or, when your Magento install is not in the root but in the sub-directory http://www.mydomain.com/magento/:


RewriteBase /magento/ RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /magento/index.php HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.mydomain.com/magento/ [R=301,L]


2. Header Settings

By default your Magento install has the title “Magento Commerce”. For your Magento shop to get the traffic it deserves you should keep at your mind:
• Search engines put more weight on the early words, so if your keywords are near the start of the page title you are more likely to rank well.
• People scanning result pages see the early words first. If your keywords are at the start of your listing your page is more likely to get clicked on.
First of all you should get rid off the default title “Magento Commerce”. Go to Configuration => Design => HTML Head. Choose a good and descriptive title for your website. This title will be used for several non-content pages without custom title, e.g. “Contact Us” and the “Popular Search Terms”.
To add your store name to all page titles, including categories and products, put your store name in “Title Suffix”. It is a better idea to keep the Prefix empty, for the reasons mentioned above. Also keep “Default Description” and “Default Keywords” empty. For a non-production environment, to prevent indexing of the site, it may be useful to set “Default Robots” to “NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” but for all other applications make sure it is set to “INDEX, FOLLOW”.
Now we are optimizing the of your web-store pages it is a good idea to add the new canonical tag. You can install the Canonical URL’s for Magento Module to add them to your head and improve your Magento SEO.
For some reason Magento turns non-set meta robots into a meta tag in this style:

This can result in some very strange behavior in the search engines, so we’ll remove it. To remove this empty metas from your code you can install the Yoast MetaRobots Module.

3. CMS Pages

At first sight Magento may lack some descent CMS functionality, but for most uses it will be flexible and powerful enough. Once you’ve given each CMS page some decent content, pick a SEF URL Identifier and page title, (while keeping in mind the points under 1.2), and go to the Meta Data tab to write a description for each CMS page that you actually want to rank with.
You can keep the “Keywords” empty. The description has one very important function: enticing people to click, so make sure it states what’s in the page they’re clicking towards, and that it gets their attention.
If you don’t use the meta description, the search engine will find the keyword searched for in your document, and automatically pick a string around that, which gives you a bolded word or two in the results page.

4. Category optimization

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. To disable this, go to System => Configuration => Catalog => Search Engine Optimization and set “Use categories path for product URL’s to “no”.
Now it’s time to set the details for each category. Go to Catalog => Manage Categories. The most important fields are:
• Meta Description: put an attractive description here; Keep in mind that people will see the description in the result listings of search engines.
• Page Title: keep this empty to use the category name including parents categories. When you customize it, the title will be exactly like your input, without the parent category.
• URL Key: try to keep a short but keyword rich URL. Removing stop words like “the”, “and”, “for” etc. is usually a good idea. Also note that you can set this only for all store views, for a multi-language store you should keep it language independent.
For each store view you can specify the Name, Description, Page Title and Meta data. For multi-language stores this is really a great feature.

5. Products optimization

Optimization of the Products pages is similar to Categories. An often-overlooked aspect of Magento SEO is how you handle your images. By for instance writing good alt tags for images and thinking of how you name the image files, you can get a nice bit of extra traffic from the different image search engines.
By default the images will be renamed to the product title, the same for titles and alt tags. With some extra effort you can set the titles and alt tags for each product image. Under the tab “Images” of the Product Information you can set the label for each product image, this value will be used for the alt and title tag. You can do this for each specified Store View.

Related posts:

1. Magento Search Engine Optimization Techniques
2. SEO for Magento Web Sites
3. Magento SEO Development