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

1. Optimization techniques based

1.1 System General

Magento is certainly, at present, the platform e-commerce on the most advanced SEO.
But it is necessary to implement a number of tricks to optimize your Magento SEO. We will detail a number below.

Magento software must be updated

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

Enable URL rewriting in your Magento store

The second step, the simplest, but not enough used in most online stores, is to enable rewriting URL (URL rewriting).
To do this, connect to the administration part of your e-commerce, and navigate to:
"System => Configuration => Web => Control: Optimization for search engines."
Then activate the use of url rewriting (rewriting Use of the Web server).

Disable codes store

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

1.1.1 WWW and non WWW

Also in this part of the administration, but this time in the panel "Secure" and "insecure", you can find two fields "Base URL".
This is where you set the access address of your shop.
He must then make a choice, either you will 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 holding you there!
If you have made your choice, then it is in your best interest to create a redirect (301 redirect) to redirect the client that accesses http://www.maboutiquemagento.com on http://maboutiquemagento.com or vice versa if you have made the choice.

For this, we must modify 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)

For your Magento store to get maximum traffic you have in mind the following:

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

This is the first words that will get their attention! If your keywords are located at the beginning of the title of the page, you will have more chance they click on it.

Change the title, description and keywords default Magento

By default, your basic installation has the title "Magento Commerce". We will change that.
In the administration of your shop, go to "System => Configuration => Design."
In the "Header HTML", change the attribute "Default Title" by choosing a catchy title and description for your shop.
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 "Keyword default".

Change the title pages of products and categories of Magento

For pages with content indexing, such as product pages, or pages categories, it is important, as we have said above, to keep the beginning of the title blank, to place the keywords of the product, or the category.
By cons, nothing prevents us to write the name of our shop at the end of the product name.
Therefore let the "Prefix as" empty, but fill in the "Suffix Title" with the text you put in "Default title" for example, or the name of your e-commerce.

Index, follow, noindex, nofollow

Also in this same panel, there is a field "Default Robots", indicating the robots of search engines whether to index the pages of your store or not.
If your shop is a shop test, or is not intended to be put into production, we must put this field to "NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW".
It would be unfortunate as Google or another search engine, index products tests, which could embarrass you later when you found on Google.
If, against, your e-commerce is in production, be sure that this field is set to "INDEX, FOLLOW".

New Canonical Tag

There are two months of that, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced the arrival of a new tag, which can be used to tell the search engine what URL to 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 one reaches from the base page, it will be url: http://maboutiquemagento.com/nom-categorie.
Now if the engine arrives on the class but with the sort of rising prices (for example), the page will address the following URL: http://maboutiquemagento.com/nom-categorie?sort=prix
So that the search engine will index the new page also.
Before the advent of this new tag, this index would have been a problem, indeed it would have been synonymous with Duplicate Content. That is the same content is indexed twice, at two different urls.
With the new tag that you add to the section of your page, now, Google only indexes the link canonical http://maboutiquemagento.com/nom-categorie rather different url by which it has arrived! So no more problem of duplicate content.
How to add this feature to my Magento store?
Simply by adding the module's Joachim Houtman developed 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 in non-set: <meta name="robots" content="*" />.
This can cause strange happenings with the search engines, so it is best to remove them.
For this you can install the Yoast MetaRobots Module via the Magento-connect: http://www.magentocommerce.com/extension/920.

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