Magento Blog

In the battle of tech terminology there’s one particular phrase that pops up time and time again and almost from every person we speak to – search engine optimisation. Too often it’s a misused or misunderstood term, so today we’ll put it into context for the eCommerce platform Magento – it’s search engine optimised out of the box, but what exactly does that mean?

Search Engine Friendly URL’s

A URL is the ‘link’ to a page on your website, traditionally database driven systems and eCommerce variants in particular have always had complex URL’s that aren’t just difficult for human visitors to understand, but equally difficult for the search engine spiders to make much sense out of. Magento is part of a new trend featuring Search Engine Friendly URL’s which essentially means they make sense in regards to the page you’re visiting. Here’s an example of Magento using SEF URLs and its standard URLs:

http://magento.refinedinternet.co.uk/sony-vaio-vgn-txn27n-b-11-1-notebook-pc.html

http://magento.refinedinternet.co.uk/review/product/list/id/27/

The first here is a traditional SEF URL, it’s human readable and makes some sense regarding the page you’re visiting. From a search engine optimisation perspective this is fantastic as it also allows the search engines to understand a little more about the content on the page and if they can understand what the page is about, they can better position you in the search engines for relevant searches.

The second link is the review page for the same product, there’s some ‘friendliness’ here but we don’t know anything about the page other than an ID number listed at the end. Luckily in Magento these type of URLs are few and far between and are not used for important pages.

Title & Description Meta Tags

From pages, to categories and even products the Title of a page and the Description of that page which are passed to search engines are completely customisable. This means you’re accurately able to depict the content of a category or product to help the search engines make better decisions when listing your products.

The Canonical Tag

A fairly recent mainstream introduction and finally making its way into systems such as Magento is the usual of the Canonical Tag. It’s a single line of code that could have the greatest single impact on the way a search engine views your site.

A long standing issue regarding search engines is the problem of ‘duplicate content’ essentially if you have two pages the same, or nearly the same, the search engines ultimately assume that you’re trying to artificially improve your search engine ranks by producing pages that are exactly the same and of no real use to human visitors. The problem is a big one for eCommerce systems and Magento in particular, there are several pages linked to a product and even different URL’s to access a product as we saw above, this makes for a lot of duplicate content.

The Canonical Tag therefore is simplicity defined, it allows you to tell the search engines that whilst several pages may appear very similar, the reason they appear similar is because they’re all actually related to a single entity with its own URL. This has been a fantastic yet simple inclusion in Magento that regardless of other features help sets it apart from the competition in real life situations.

Search Engine Optimised Sitemaps and Searches

Now onto a slightly shadier element of it’s optimisation. Magento produces what are referred to as sitemap pages which list every page, category and product on your website as well as Popular Search pages, listing recent and popular searches on your store.

They’re slightly shady as it’s a direct attempt to allow search engines ease of access to the content on your site through a single collection of pages, rather than through effective traditional navigation. It can certainly be argued that these pages are of use to human visitors as well, but we all know why they’re there and it isn’t for humans. At the end of the day however it’s not the greyest of grey tactic and it’ll certainly help all your Magento store get indexed all the quicker.

Semantically Search Engine Optimised Code

If there’s one thing we always emphasise it’s that any website, eCommerce or otherwise should be correctly optimised on a code level. That means that the search engines can see which elements of content on your Magento store it should be taking particular note of precisely for the reason of improving your overall position in the rankings. It also means that any extra optimisation you do is all the more effective.

The team behind Magento hold this same mantra too and have gone to extra effort to make sure their code is well optimised. For starters Table tags are only used where they are supposed to be used, whilst that might not make sense to many it’s a relic of older website development days that presents a whole new set of problems if not used correctly.

The main focus however is on semantic code, that the correct tags are used to describe the content. For example the most obvious is the use of the H1 tag, this is a tag that describes the main heading for the page Heading 1. When implemented correctly this can tell a search engine (as well as a human visitor) that if the page is about anything at all it’s about the content contained in the H1 tag. Used incorrectly this can confuse search engines and whilst it wont stop you being listed, it does make the process less efficient and will ultimately result in lower ranks than you should be capable of – but you don’t need to worry about that, because Magento already has it covered.

Summary

There we have it, some great features contained in Magento on the search engine front, we could have gone on longer but you should have the general idea by now, Magento is very well optimised out of the box which ultimately ensures your Magento eCommerce store will naturally rank better than most if not all other similar systems out there.

Magento eCommerce at Refined Internet

Here at Refined Internet we work with many different systems and technologies, but one more so than the rest – Magento. Every day we work on Magento projects for clients looking for Magento Manchester and across the rest of the UK and have done for the best part of 4 years, producing effective online stores and helping our clients to grow. Head over to our Magento service page for more information and contact us for a no obligation quote.

Related posts:

1. Introducing Magento