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

1. Basic optimization techniques

1.1 System General

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

Your software must be updated Magento

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

Enable URL rewriting in your Magento shop

The second step, the simplest, but not yet sufficiently used in most online stores, is to enable the rewrite 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.
Then activate the use of url rewriting (rewriting Use the Web server).

Disable store codes

While you're in this part, remember to disable "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".
This is where you set the access address of your shop.
It must then make a choice, 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 it!
If you have made your choice, then it is in your best interest to create a redirect (301 redirect) to redirect customers who would access http://www.maboutiquemagento.com on http://maboutiquemagento.com or vice versa if you have made another choice.

To do this, you must change 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 Header (Header)

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

• 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 the page title, you will most likely be ranked higher.
• People (and maybe your future clients) doing research, roam 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 beginning of the title page, you'll have more chance they click on it.

Change the title, description and keywords default Magento

By default, your basic installation is titled "Magento Commerce. We will change this.
In the administration part of your shop, go to "System => Settings => 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 "Keywords by default.

Change the title of the product pages and categories Magento

For pages with content indexing, such as product pages, categories or pages, it is important, as we said above, keep the current title blank, to place the keywords of the product, or category.
By cons, nothing prevents us to write the name of our shop at the end of the product name.
Therefore, leave the field "Prefix as" empty, but fill the field "as Suffix" with the text you set 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", indicating the search engine robots 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, we must put this field to: "noindex, nofollow".
It is a shame that Google or another search engine, indexes test 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".

New tag Canonical

There's something in 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 is an example:
Imagine a category page of your Magento store. If they are accessed from basic page, it will be 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 index both the new page.
Before the emergence of this new tag, this index would have been a problem, indeed it would have been synonymous Duplicate Content. This means that 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 from indexing the canonical link: http://maboutiquemagento.com/nom-categorie rather different url by which he 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 in non-set: <meta name="robots" content="*" />.
This can cause strange happenings with search engines, it is best to remove them.
For this you can install modules via the module Yoast MetaRobots Magento-connect: http://www.magentocommerce.com/extension/920.

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