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.
Disallow: /index.php/
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /catalogsearch/advanced/
Disallow: /review/
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /downloader/
Disallow: /js/
Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /pkginfo/
Disallow: /report/
Disallow: /skin/
Disallow: /var/
Sitemap: http://www.domain.co.uk/sitemap.xm
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Tags: e-commerce, Magento, On Site
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