When running a Magento webshop, SEO is vital for your organic listings. Organic traffic can become a big part of your revenue, so you should definitely SEO optimize your Magento shop. We found that other tutorials on the internet were lacking the necessary SEO tips you should apply to your Magento site, so we decided to create the Ultimate SEO Guide for Magento. This guide will mostly be about on-site SEO, off-site SEO will be discussed in an other tutorial later.
Add SSL Security
SSL Security is a must nowadays for web shops. Your visitors are getting pickier, and some even use a “no SSL, no sale” policy. Obtaining an SSL certificate does not have a direct impact on SEO, but it does have a direct impact on Site Security, and Trust. Obtaining an SSL certificate can be done at any domain registrar, and it is well worth the purchase. All pages on your Magento site that deal with personal information like the my account page, checkout process or admin backend will then be served from the https protocol. Users will get a green lock in their browser bar, which increases trust on your website, which yields in more sales. Please do note that you set the Secure base url appropriately like the picture below. This can be done in the admin backend under System > Configuration > Web.
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Auto redirect to Base URL
The auto redirect to Base url should always be set to 301 redirect. This lets Google know that the base url is the permanent URL of your Magento website. If you leave it to 302 (default), Google will treat it as a temporary redirect, which has a negative effect on your SEO. You can change this setting in the Admin backend under System > Configuration > Web. Please checkout the example below.
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No-index non Content Pages
We highly recommend that you No-index non content pages. Non content pages are basically pages in your shop that have no interesting content for search engines like account pages, contact us forms & tags. You can edit this setting in the Admin backend under System > Configuration > Web. We advice you to No-index all non content pages like the example below, but you can adjust to your own needs.
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Use the rel=canonical tag on your Magento pages
We advice you to use the Canonical Module from Yoast. This plugin adds the rel=canonical tag between the <head> tags on your original links. The rel=canonical tag lets Google know that the page that has the tag is the only original page link, that Google should pass link juice to. This greatly reduces duplicate content issues on your website, and improves your SEO by a lot.
301 redirect www to non www with mod_rewrite
We strongly advise you to redirect any www url to non www, to prevent duplicate content issues. This can be simply done in the .htaccess file of your Magento website using mod_rewrite. This will make sure that if anyone enters your site using http://www, they will automatically be redirected to the http:// adress. The 301 redirect also lets Google know that this is a permanent redirect, and that your http:// is the permanent page url. The following code should do the trick.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]Whereas example.com is of course the url of your own website.
Increase Site Speed with Full Page Cache
Loading speed of websites plays a big role in SEO nowadays. Speed is a big problem for most Magento webshops, as they are massive most of the time. They have a huge database, and it all just takes a very good web hosting to run the CMS at good speed. There are however great ways of increasing the loading speed of your Magento site. One of these ways is installing the free Full Page Cache module by Zoom. This plugin reduces the loading time of your Magento webpages to under 1/10th of a second. We also recommend you to get a dedicated Magento hosting to make sure your store runs in an optimized hosting environment. We’ve made a selection of the best Magento hosting providers out there that can help you a lot.
Set proper Meta Titles & Descriptions
Meta Titles & Descriptions are one of the most important on-site SEO factors. The Meta title and description decide how your site is going to show up in Google and other search engines, so choose them carefully and properly, preferrably for each page. From product pages to your Home page, these things just have to be set in order to gain authority from search engines.
Create an XML Sitemap for your Magento site
XML Sitemaps are very important for any Magento webshop, as they are simply the most effective way to feed Google your urls, and let them spider your pages. Luckily, Magento has a decent XML Sitemap generator built in. You can go to System > Catalog > Google Sitemap to enable the default XML Sitemap. You can use the settings in the picture below as an example. The default sitemap will be generated on yourdomainurl.com/sitemap.xml. You can use it to directly feed your urls into Google webmaster tools, for a faster crawling rate.
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Install Magento Ultimate Search Engine Optimization Suite
There are many SEO plugins available, but none of them is as effective as Ultimate SEO Suite from Aheadworks. The plugin automatically does all the things listed above, and then it does even more. The SEO Suite was installed on a Magento shop of our clients, and within 1 week they saw positive increments in traffic, which yielded in more sales. The money the extension costs is a steal if you compare what you’ll earn from its benefits.
If you have taken all the steps mentioned above then it is safe to say that you have a good SEO optimized Magento website. If you have any questions regarding SEO on Magento, you can always use the contact form to get help from us!
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