Magento is a great system for building e-commerce websites; it’s not bad for marketing them either. Out of the box there are no truly bad default settings for SEO and it offers handy functions to make your life easier.
In this article I’ll take a look at changing some of the less than optimal defaults and talk about some of the other settings you may want to use.
Many of these settings will be in System -> Configuration in your Magento backend.
Auto-redirect to Base URL
This dictates the type of redirect that will move customers from, for example, the non www version of your URL to the www version. This will often be set to “Yes (302 Found)” – Change it to “Yes (301 Moved Permanently)”:
Use Web Server Rewrites
In the tab below Url Options, ‘Search Engines Optimization’, you can enable web server re-writes. Setting this to yes will strip out the unnecessary /index.php/ from your URLs and make them a bit more user (and search engine) friendly.
NB: for this to work your Apache server needs mod_rewrite enabled. Talk to your developer (or us!) if you are stuck at this point.
HTML Head
On the left hand side of the page under ‘general’ click on the ‘design’ tab. Here we can set a default title, prefix/suffix, description etc.
If you want your brand name on each page title, which would normally be at the end of the tag, enter content into ‘Title Suffix’, for example: “| Brand Name”. This will append a pipe followed by your brand name to each tag.
Some people suggest avoiding a default meta description because it can cause duplication. I believe that having a solid overall description with a good call to action is better than leaving it blank, even if it gets duplicated a few times. Just make sure to manually update new meta descriptions wherever your SEO tool flags that duplication.
Search Engine Optimisations
Go to ‘Catalog’ on the left hand side and click on ‘Search Engine Optimisations’. Here will set a few more handy settings.
You’ll particularly want to enable an autogenerated site map – very important to sort this out and submit it to Google.
Depending on how your navigation is set up, this next section might be the most important setting we’ve discussed. Turning on the ‘Use Canonical Link Meta Tag’ for categories and products can greatly lower the number of pages that seem duplicated. It’s a good idea to verify this with your preferred SEO tool, as I’ve noticed it can sometimes cause issues.
Google Sitemap
Finally, under ‘Catalog’ go to ‘Google Sitemap’ and set your update frequencies accurately. At the bottom under ‘Generation Settings’ set enabled to ‘Yes’ and I’d advise setting the start time to your quietest time of business.
I hope that’s helped you set some sensible defaults for your Magento store.