We will begin today, the first part of our series of articles on SEO SEO with Magento.

1. Optimization techniques based

1.1 System General

Magento is surely today, the platform e-commerce is the most advanced on the listing.
But it is necessary to implement a number of tips to optimize your SEO Magento store. We'll look at a number below.

Magento Your software must be updated

The first step is of course always have the version of Magento to date, and not to push the updates overnight.
Many problems are consistently reported and corrected, it is important that your store has.

Enable URL rewriting in your Magento shop

The second step, the simplest, but not enough yet used in most online stores, is to start rewriting URL (URL rewriting).
To do this, login into the administration part of your e-commerce, then navigate to:
"System => Settings => Web => Control: Optimization for search engines.
Enable then use url rewriting (rewriting Using Web server).

Disable store codes

While you're in this part, consider disabling "Add code to store URLs" in the panel "Options Url.

1.1.1 WWW and non-WWW

Also in this part of the administration, but this time in the panel "Secure" and "Unsecured", you can find two fields "Base URL".
Here you set the address to access your store.
He must then make a choice, either you use to address your e-commerce: http://www.maboutiquemagento.com either: http://maboutiquemagento.com.
Whether you choose one or the other does not matter, what matters is that you do and you were standing there!
If you've made your choice, then it is in your interest to create a redirect (301 redirect) to redirect the client to access http://www.maboutiquemagento.com on http://maboutiquemagento.com or vice versa if you have made another choice.

For this, we must edit your. Htaccess at the root of your site and add around line 119:
RewriteBase / RewriteCond% (THE_REQUEST) ^ [AZ] (3.9) \ / index \. Php \ HTTP /
RewriteRule ^ index \. Http://www.maboutiquemagento.com/ php $ [R = 301, L]

or if your installation is in a subfolder, such as: http://www.maboutiquemagento.com/boutique/
RewriteBase / magento / RewriteCond% (THE_REQUEST) ^ [AZ] (3.9) \ / magento / index \. Php \ HTTP /
RewriteRule ^ index \. Http://www.maboutiquemagento.com/magento/ php $ [R = 301, L]

1.2 Parameters of the header (Header)

To make your Magento store to ensure maximum traffic you must keep in mind the following points:

• Search engines give higher priority to words that are located at the top of the page title. So if your keywords are located at the top of the page title, you will most likely be ranked.
• People (and maybe your future clients) doing research, traverse the resulting page in their search for a look and do not read everything.

It's the first words that will attract their attention! If your keywords are located at the top of the page title, you will have more chance they click on it.

Edit title, description and keywords default Magento

By default, your basic installation has the title "Magento Commerce. We will change that.
In the administration part of your shop, go to "System => Settings => Design.
In the "Header HTML", change the attribute "Default title" choosing a catchy title and description for your store.
This title will be used for pages with no content to be referenced. For example, the page "Contact Us" ...
Do the same for the fields: "Default description" and "Keywords default.

Change the title pages of products and categories Magento

For pages with indexable content, such as product pages, categories or pages, it is important, as we said above, keep the current title empty, to place the keywords of the product, or category.
By cons, nothing prevents us to write the name of our shop in the end product name.
Therefore, leave the field "Prefix as" empty, but fill in the "suffix title" the text that you put in "Default title" for example, or the name of your e-commerce.

Index, follow, noindex, nofollow

Also in this panel, there is a field "Robots default", showing the robots of search engines if they are indexing the pages of your shop or not.
If your shop is a shop test, or is not intended to be put into production, you must add this field: noindex, nofollow ".
It is unfortunate that Google or another search engine, indexes of testing products, which could embarrass you later when you find on Google.
If, cons, your e-commerce is in production, be sure that this field is set to "INDEX, FOLLOW".

Canonical new tag

There it two months, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have announced the arrival of a new tag that can be used to tell the search engine what URL it should index the page on which it is located.
This seems a little vague words like that, here's an example:
Imagine a category page of your Magento store. If they are accessed from the base page, it will be like url: http://maboutiquemagento.com/nom-categorie.
Now if the engine arrives on the category, but with the sort of ascending price (for example), the page will address the following url: http://maboutiquemagento.com/nom-categorie?sort=prix
What makes the search engine will also index the new page.
Before the advent of this new tag, that will have a problem, because it was synonymous with Duplicate Content. That is the same content is indexed twice, with two different urls.
With the new tag that you add to the section of your page, now Google from indexing the canonical link: http://maboutiquemagento.com/nom-categorie rather different url by which it arrived! So no more problem of duplicate content.
How to add this feature to my Magento store?
Simply by adding the module has developed Joachim Houtman using Magento-connect: http://www.magentocommerce.com/module/906/canonical-url-s-for-magento. You can view this article on how to use Magento-connect.

Remove non-set in the header

For some reason, Magento defines the meta robots Non-set: <meta name="robots" content="*" />.
This can cause strange with search engines, so it is best to remove them.
For this you can install the module via Yoast MetaRobots the Magento-connect: http://www.magentocommerce.com/extension/920.

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