This guide will show you everything you need to know about Magento and eCommerce SEO. First I’ll cover some of the more general areas like Magento theme markup, website content and backlink building. As you read along you’ll find supplementary links to Magento extensions and blog posts. Occasionally we’ll dig into the configuration settings provided by Magento to optimize your SEO.
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Semantic HTML Markup
If you’re developing your own Magento themes, it’s a good idea to invest some of your time reviewing the markup in your Magento templates. Magento suffers from bloated and messy front-end code but in general it’s decent for SEO.
Page Title
Google recommends using unique, descriptive titles that accurately describe the page’s content. Magento handles this very well and avoids putting your store name in every single title (this is good). Remember to change your homepage title!
Tip: Change the title of your homepage by editing “Home page” under CMS > Pages. Update the page title accordingly.
Description Meta Tag
Google recommends providing a unique description meta tag with a short summary of the page. By default, Magento uses the “Default Description” in your system configuration for every single page. Luckily you can write custom title, description, and keyword meta tags for any product via the admin panel.
Tip: Go to System > Configuration. Under General > Design, go to the HTML Head section and update your “Default Title” and “Default Description”.
Tip: For fine-grained meta tag control over each of your products, go to Catalog > Manage Products. Select a product and click the “Meta Information” tab.
Keyword Meta Tag
Do you need to use or care about the keyword meta tag? If your sole focus is ranking on Google, the answer is no. Google determines your keywords automatically. It’s believed the other major search engines such as Yahoo and Bing also ignore the keyword meta tag. If you want to cater to smaller search engines, it certainly won’t hurt you to include the tag!
Tip: For fine-grained meta tag control over each of your categories, go to Catalog > Manage Categories. Select a category and find the meta information under the “General Information” tab.
Header Tags
This is the bread and butter of markup SEO. Header tags range from <h1> (most important) to <h6> (least important). It creates a hierarchical structure for your content that makes it easier for users to navigate your page. You’ll notice the text size appears larger for more important header tags. For best results you should only use the <h1> for the main title. Use <h2>’s and <h3>’s to divide up your content sections.
You’ll notice Magento already has you covered when it comes to <h1>’s. You’ll want to pay careful attention to the CMS pages and product descriptions that you write yourself. Make sure you use header tags such as <h2>’s and <h3>’s to divide up content sections. Use less important header tags at your own discretion.
Paragraphs
Use plenty of paragraphs, especially for long-form content. This may sound obvious, but if you use some of the sample data provided by Magento you’ll notice the product descriptions were ripped to shreds by the CMS editor with <br> line breaks. Stick with paragraphs and use line breaks sparingly. Keep your description markup clean with paragraphs so if you ever decide to update your design to a premium Magento theme your content will look great!
Links
Magento handles internal linking pretty well when it comes to site navigation. The purpose of internal linking is to help search engine spiders, build keyword relevancy for a page and increase Google PageRank. You want to make sure the spiders can find every single page, so you’ll need to link to your CMS pages somewhere like the footer. Focus on the footer and inline content links. Magento will handle your primary navigation.
Tip: Build a mini sitemap in the footer for your CMS pages, such as customer service and frequently asked questions.
Tip: Use the “title” attribute on your internal links. Using descriptive titles with keywords could have a minor improvement to your SEO and PageRank.
Images
Always fill in the “Label” box for each product image! Magento uses your label for the “alt” and “title” attributes in the <img> tag. Likewise, don’t forget to include these when using custom images. They’re very important.
Quality Website Content
One of the most important things you should always do no matter what: Write high quality content! I recommend finishing your catalog content first. This is no easy feat but it’s critical to your store’s SEO. Don’t copy someone else’s product descriptions. Write them yourself or hire a freelance writer to do it for you.
Product Descriptions
It’s easy to add content to your product pages in Magento. The product editor’s “Description” tab allows you to quickly write information about each product using the WYSIWYG editor or plaintext.
Custom Product Attributes
Magento allows you to create custom attributes and attribute sets. This means you can add your own content areas for specific categories and products. You can see examples of this in action by using the Magento Sample Data. Cell phones have a unique attribute set with content areas such as “Dimensions” and “Activation Information”. These attributes include textareas for you to write content.
Category Pages
In order to add content to your category landing pages, you’ll have to create CMS static blocks. After adding a static block for the category of your choice, head on over to Catalog > Manage Categories. Under the “Display Settings” tab you can configure the use of a static block by changing the “Display Mode” and then choosing a “CMS Block”.
Filter Static Blocks
As far as I know there is no solution out there for displaying static blocks based on a catalog filter. This would be a great feature to have, especially when you want to provide additional information about a filter! If you’re interested in this feature leave a comment.
Miscellaneous CMS Pages
There’s so many opportunities to write original content. Here’s a few more ideas to get you started:
- Brand Portals
- Resource Guides
- FAQ Directory
- Customer Service Center
User-Generated Content
Content written by your customers for free is just plain awesome. Who wouldn’t want some of that? It brings so many benefits to SEO, conversion, support and even branding. Magento allows customers to write reviews, create wishlists and add their own tags. How do you take it to the next level? What are some of today’s top eCommerce websites doing to build more content?
Enhanced Reviews (Photos, Video and Voting)
Reviews in Magento are fairly basic and straightforward. You can specify different rating categories and whether or not guests can submit reviews. I recommend allowing reviews from guests and moderating them later. You want to make it as easy as possible for customers to submit reviews.
There’s a variety of ways to spruce up your product reviews for increased engagement and more content. Product videos and photos submitted by your customers is a great example. You’ll want to check out my extension Review Photos to allow customers to upload photos along with their reviews.
Questions & Answers
Q&A can be a goldmine of SEO potential. If someone has a question about one of your products, lots of other people probably have the same question as well. You want to be the top result for that question on Google.
Most of the Q&A Magento extensions simply allow customers to submit questions. A store administrator can write answers and approve them. This is probably the best way to go, but having a way for customers to answer questions as well might be useful. Check out the Product Questions extension from Aheadworks to add questions and answers to your Magento store.
Integrated Social Network
Sites like Backcountry.com and GiantNerd.com are killing it when it comes to eCommerce social networking. It’s a very cool concept and it’s apparently taking the outdoor apparel and equipment industry by storm. On these websites you sign up and earn reputation for answering questions, posting photos, writing reviews and just being helpful to others. Backcountry has a leaderboard showing the most knowledgable gear experts. You can even see if a product was just bought live on their catalog grid! GiantNerd shows a live news feed on their homepage showing the latest activity of their customers.
eCommerce social networks have a lot of potential and will bring in the next phase of eCommerce once it’s better integrated with mobile devices. Social commerce isn’t Facebook stores or tweeting coupons on Twitter. Social commerce is bringing the social back to where your customers actually buy!
Forums
Active forums bring a wealth of SEO benefits and magic to the table, especially for long-tail keywords. If you’re ready for the challenge, vBulletin is the best forum script out there. Just be prepared to devote a lot of time upfront to get the conversation flowing. Over the long-term, forums can deliver great ROI and SEO.
To integrate vBulletin with your Magento store, check out this extension.
Product Videos & Photos
High quality video and photos will have a significant impact on both conversion rate and SEO. This includes producing your own marketing videos, taking your own photos, or even showing off user-generated content. Customer-submitted photos and video testimonials not only build trust with prospective buyers but they can also help you stand out in the search results. Google gives special treatment to videos, often placing them at the top of the search results or showing a video thumbnail next to your link.
Hosting your product videos on YouTube allows you to reach a wider audience but I recommend using a video hosting solution such as Vzaar or Viddler. Paying for a video platform gives you full control over the presentation of your videos. You can let others embed your video and link to your website giving you more link juice. With YouTube you don’t reap the benefits of SEO. Either way, displaying video on your website will improve the CTR in your search results.
Including original product photos can help you show up on Google Images, which is a useful traffic resource all in itself. If you want your customers to submit their own product photos you should check out my Review Photos extension for Magento 1.6. This makes the process really easy and includes the photos directly in the reviews, similar to Amazon. I’m planning to add video support in the near future.
Company Blog
Google loves original new content. The more the better. That’s why you need a blog! Quoting Google’s SEO Starter Guide:
Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here.
Stay organized around your store’s target niche. Go with WordPress and install the All in One SEO Pack. The next thing you should do is brainstorm a list of ideas you want to write about. Check out the section below for some neat ideas to get backlinks and viral traffic!
Backlinks
Many SEO experts would say half the battle is building quality content. The other half is getting tons of backlinks, preferably from websites in your target industry or niche. How do you get lots of backlinks and link juice? Here’s some ideas:
- Write interesting blog posts like Top 10 lists, how-to guides or extensive product reviews. Make it easy to share and bookmark.
- Create widgets for webmasters and forum posters to spread the word. Example: I Heart Zappos
- Create a viral quiz or wizard for your products. Example: Would you eat your buddies in a blizzard
- Design cool infographics about a topic in your industry.
- Make a video about one of your products and make it easy for others to embed with a link back to your website.
- Discuss product trends or popular products.
For more backlink techniques, listen to Matt Cutts with the Search Quality group at Google:
Link Directories
Submitting your website to directories such as Dmoz and the Yahoo Directory can give you an additional SEO boost. Older link directories tend to have higher PageRank. If you get accepted into these link directories you’ll be able to gain some extra link juice from the backlinks. For a detailed listing of directories with high PR, click here.
Edu/Gov Backlinks
Websites ending with the .edu domain extension are regarded with more authority and trust in the eyes of Google. Getting an Edu backlink can easily provide more link juice than hundreds of low PR backlinks. However, they can be very hard to obtain. Google denies that .edu and .gov domains have more influence, but most SEO experts say otherwise.
Social Media
As Google continues to shift its strategy towards unifying social and search with the introduction of Google+, social media will play an important role in SEO. You can already find live tweets and Google+ recommended pages from your friends in the SERPs. There’s two different approaches you should take when attacking social media websites:
- Stay active on major social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. When Google+ adds brand/company pages, get on there right away. In the future, Google may use your number of followers or fans to determine influence. It’s definitely possible!
- Submit interesting blog posts, cool product videos and viral ideas to social media websites such as StumbleUpon or Reddit. Those are just a few ideas. Get creative!
Google Sitemaps with Video and Image Metadata
The best way to help Google index all of the pages in your Magento store is to submit an XML Sitemap. This helps Googlebot index pages that are harder to find or undiscoverable during the normal crawling process. This is especially helpful when your website is brand new and doesn’t have too many URLs indexed.
Magento can generate XML Sitemaps for you automatically. Make sure sitemaps are enabled via System > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog > Search Engine Optimizations as “Autogenerated Site Map”. You can include the sitemap file in your robots.txt or submit it manually using Google Webmaster Tools. For more information about sitemaps and Magento, click here.
Have you ever wondered how you can get your product photos to show up on Google Images? Use a Google Image Sitemap. There’s several Magento SEO extensions that support image metadata, including the Ultimate SEO Suite.
Microformats
Microformats can help you stand out in the search engine result pages. Use the hReview and hProduct microformats to add stars, review counts, and pricing to your page listings on Google. For more information, read my article on microformats for Magento.
Google Webmaster Tools
If you haven’t signed up already, you absolutely need to start tracking your Magento store on Google Webmaster Tools. Use this to see if your website is being indexed properly by Google and ensure your sitemap was analyzed. GWT will also inform you of any indexing issues such as duplicate content or titles.
Make Your Website Fast
Speed is absolutely essential to creating a great eCommerce experience as well as increasing your conversion rate and improving your SEO. To learn more about how to supercharge your website speed in Magento, click here for my comprehensive guide. At the very least make sure you enable caching and move any inline JavaScript or CSS to external files.
To make your search blazing fast, I recommend using Lucene with Magento. Apache Lucene is an open source indexing engine that will dramatically improve the quality of your search results. Blast Lucene Search is an extension that hooks into your Lucene installation.
Enable URL Rewrites
Go to System > Configuration > General > Web. Under “Search Engines Optimization” turn on “Web Server Rewrites”. This feature makes your URLs cleaner and easier to understand by removing “/index.php” from the URL. Magento includes the title of each product in the URL by default, resulting in keyword-rich URLs.
Eliminate Duplicate Content Issues
Magento is a very extensive system and you may still encounter duplicate content issues even if you submit an XML sitemap to Google. Here’s a few more things you can do to resolve them:
Go to System > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog. Under “Search Engines Optimization” you’ll find a lot of awesome SEO settings. Enable canonical tags for both categories and products to reduce duplicate content issues. Turn off “Use Categories Path for Product URLs”, as Magento has been known to create duplicate content issues with this setting enabled (creating 4 URLs per product). If you’d like to keep this enabled and you’re feeling adventurous, check out this useful post.
Canonical Tags
Put simply, canonical tags allow you to specify a preferred version of a given URL. Say one of your category or product pages can be accessed through multiple URLs. These URLs are different (some might include tracking codes or category tags) but they all point to the same page. By adding the canonical <link> tag to your <head>, Google will index the preferred URL.
To learn more about canonical tags, click here.
To WWW or Not via .htaccess
Duplicate content issues can sometimes occur if Google ends up indexing one of your pages with the “WWW” included and the same page without the “WWW”. You need to create a 301 redirect from the non-WWW to the WWW version by editing your .htaccess with mod_rewrite.
1 2 | RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /index.php HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.mymagentostore.com/ [R=301,L] |
Non-Content Pages
Joost de Valk, a leading expert in search engine optimization, recommends that you tell search engine spiders to follow your non-content pages but not to index them. He built a Magento extension to specifically handle this called Yoast_MetaRobots. I recommend using this for your store to prevent duplicate content issues.
Nofollow Links
If you have internal pages you don’t want Google to see, then use rel=”nofollow” on your links. This is particularly useful for those non-content pages like account/login, cart, checkout and wishlist. Same for “Add to Compare” and “Add to Wishlist”. You may have to edit these links manually in your template files.
Develop a Content & Keyword Strategy
The key to dominating SEO in your niche is to develop a content strategy for your targeted keywords and stick with it! Not sure which keywords to target? Use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to estimate keyword traffic. Make sure you check [Exact] under “Match Types”. This will help you center your content-writing efforts around high-traffic keywords. Your individual product pages will target long-tail keywords such as product names, bringing in additional traffic.
After you have a good idea of your main keywords, determine where you want to start writing content on your website. I recommend first fleshing out all of the product pages with SEO-optimized quality content. Move on to your category pages next and then begin a daily or weekly content schedule for activities such as blogging.
Stay on Top of SEO
Google is constantly changing their search algorithms. As long as you provide quality content you should be fine. Make sure you monitor your website in Google Webmaster Tools and read SEO blogs occasionally to stay on top of things. Here’s a few blogs and resources to get started:
Blogs:
Books & Resources:
This article covered Magento SEO in-depth and provided new ideas to improve SEO for any eCommerce website. There’s still many topics I haven’t covered yet, such as keyword and competition research.
Stay tuned for more updates!
