SEO extension for Magento
Magento is an ecommerce platform which have useful set of methods which can rank better your store up shortly. We can talk about its ecommerce tools for a long time but now I would like to mention search engine optimization (SEO) matters of this engine. Magento itself is a very seo-friendly and seo-optimized script in the default functionality. But still there are many issues which you should care of and which can be solved by using Magento SEO.
Duplicate content problem.
This is one of the main issues with Magento. (Magento 1.4 already has built-in solution for this). Why it happens: the product in Magento can be accessible from different URLs:
- site.com/product.html
- site.com/category1/product.html
- site.com/category1/category2/product.html
etc.
As a result the pages with the same content will be accessible for indexing from different URLs. How can it be solved? The best solution for this is an usage of canonical tag. This is official tag added by Google to fix duplicate content problem.
The same problem with pagination, sorting reviews, tags etc.
The solution which is provided by Magento SEO Suite Pro extension: it adds the canonical tag to all the pages so that all the duplicates will be linked to the basic page.
Example:
- site.com/product.html
- site.com/category1/product.html
- site.com/category1/category2/product.html
All these pages will be linked to site.com/product.html using canonical tag (it’s possible to choose the basic URL, i.e. all these pages can lead to - site.com/category1/product.html).
Thus, the duplicate content problem is completely solved with SEO Suite Pro extension.
Site map
The following problem is a standard sitemap of Magento. It is not seo-friendly out of the box. The standard Magento sitemap is separated by product and category sitemaps. It means that you get the list of all your products and categories on different pages at all with pagers on each page. Not good for seo, isn’t it? Besides, it does not contain static pages, i.e. such pages won’t be listed in your sitemap.
SEO Suite Pro offers advanced Magento sitemap solution. It allows displaying the products, categories and CMS pages on one page in hierarchical order. After this your sitemap becomes user and seo-friendly.
NOINDEX, FOLLOW
Magento has quite lots of pages which are not necessary for seo but are necessary for correct functionality. These pages are like cart, checkout, enable cookies etc. I suggest adding NOINDEX, FOLLOW tag to such pages. This will allow not to index them but to follow by the links from them and index other pages.