CREATIVE DISTRICT

Though a standard Magento installation does contain alot of SEO oriented features there are still a few things you can do to improve upon this. The first thing is to make good use of Magento’s Meta Information sections. Your page titles should be consistent with the content on the page, on your product pages you should focus on your products name and manufacturer and try and use this as your product pages <h1> tag also. For your category pages you need to enter an enticing description as this is what will show up next to your results on search engines, so this is the little bit you’ve got to convince customers you’re better than the competition!

Another good way to add the all important content to your Magento site is through use of the CMS Pages you can use these pages for your extra content such as your About Us, Delivery Info etc. But you can also make good use of them as pages such as manufacturer/brand directorys with content regarding your manufacturers/brands that will only help but to bump up your positions on search engines aslong as you stick to the general SEO rules of not using duplicated content and creating good inward links across the site.

You can also get some unique content into your category pages via the Category Description in Magento’s category management section. You can call this in your template by using:

<?php echo $_helper->categoryAttribute($_category, $_description, ‘description’) ?>

You can also make this abit more aesthetically pleasing by placing it inside a <div> tag with a fixed height and setting the overflow to auto, giving the area scrollbox effect. The content in this section as always should be unique and relevant to the category it’s placed inside.

One feature of Magento and pretty much any online shopping cart is duplicate content! With Magento you will usually end up with something like this:

domain.com/product.html
domain.com/category1/product.html
domain.com/catalog/product/view/id/1/
domain.com/catalog/product/view/id/1/category/1/

Not very good for your optimisation! Don’t fear, help is at hand! In the form of Yoast’s MetaRobots Extension that will help with preventing the indexing of most of your duplicating content.

Once you’ve got most of this sorted you should be on the right tracks to getting your website indexed more efficiently by the top search engines. Magento SEO optimisation is no simple task and will take continued effort, especially keeping up with continued content addition, product description and meta information.

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