Earlier today, Mani Karthik posted some interesting insights on SEO in the wake of social media for Search Engine Land. Strong stuff—here’s a quick summary of his points.

Don’t Jump the Gun

Many speak of SEO as if it were already dead, or as if it had been replaced for good by the ubiquitous forces of Social Media. These fears aren’t entirely unfounded—search updates like Penguin and Panda have a way of igniting controversy—but let’s not get carried away. It’s still far too early in the game to call any shots. Recognizing that the industry is in transition, what we can say is that certain traditional (as it were) search engine signals are being supplanted as more accurate, genuine measures of content efficacy come into play. As the scales of importance tip, we have to be extra careful not to write off efforts which can still benefit searchability or reputation in the long-term. Social media remains a value-adding proposition, more than ever, but SEO as an enterprise has resources too rich and roots too deep to just up and vanish.

Zooming In

Using “social” as a term already paints with too broad a brush. Which platforms, and why? To understand this, let’s take a look at the evolution of web behavior (particularly with regard to consumer habits) over the years. Search algorithms haven’t fundamentally changed in purpose: they’re designed to return the best possible results quickly, presented in an uncluttered interface to improve the user experience. Concurrently, though, the nature of web communication and the treatment of content have fundamentally changed. You don’t have to go too far back to see how new the concept of “curated sharing” really is in the grand scheme of things. Around the turn of the millennium, search engines really only focused on indexing mountains of data by relevance to satisfy this or that particular query. These primitive algorithms parsed by basic user behaviors and rudimentary filtering, but didn’t do much beyond that.

A Sea Change

Over time, we learned that users prefer to share information in smaller, more frequent pieces, and increased autonomy has led to more widespread authority instead of concentrating it in a few major silos. In the old days, trustworthiness was a function of “trust,” defined by the volume of links your site had. Lacking a reliable way to judge content, search engines attributed authority to Wikipedia, established brands, and academia. Now, however, search engines recognize and promote social signals as an organic way of identifying and communicating value. So instead of just links, they now look at likes, shares, tweets, and other human elements in the equation.

Down the Rabbit Hole

But the story doesn’t stop there. It’s pretty astounding how sophisticated social parameters and metrics have become in the present day: think engagement levels, reach amplification, frequency, co-citations, demographics, circles, etc. And it’s not as if no one thought of these before—they’ve long been a target for TV and radio—but rather, raw data can now be processed in meaningful ways, eliminating guesswork in the analysis.

All of this is to say that social media is so integral to the core of SEO that it doesn’t make sense to speak of it as replacing SEO in the battle for refined search. The symbiosis benefits both, as many digital integrations are wont to do, and therein lies the ingenuity. And, of course, we should expect changes to continue; optimization is still largely a learning process.

Coming Up Next in SEO and Social

So what will happen to social media if SEO is evolving at such a rapid pace? Well, much the same thing. It’s useful to frame the discussion in terms of simplified technology: streamlined or intuitive controls reflect ever more nuanced subtleties in user behavior, and can even become dominant enough to directly influence behavior. Think about the difference between a cumbersome search on AskJeeves and a voice-activated search using Siri for iPhone. That’s not even getting into the next generation, exemplified by Google Glass and other augmented-reality devices, which could eventually communicate fluently across limitless media. As these technologies hone their effectiveness, we may see some truly mind-blowing changes:

• Websites free of any SEO campaigns, instead accruing value and relevance solely through social citation.
• Search engines capitalizing on people’s recommendations in novel ways, weighing value not through explicit likes or shares, but rather aggregated impact in real time across a multitude of loci.
• Local search exploding in importance and customization.
• More sophisticated platforms addressing emerging populations and differentiating from one another in ways that speak more strongly to certain types.
• An implosion or state change in “authority” to incorporate personal influence, circles, and redefined domain expertise.
• Merged Web and Social search with strategic intersections.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. When we consider search in terms of two variables—User and Data—we can already see powerful boosts in efficiency, simplicity, and relevance in how the two interact. And we can be certain that the demand that spurred the innovations we’re witnessing will continue to refine any and all processes over the next decade and beyond. And, as always, the marketer who can think like a bot is the one who will find success—the difference being that it may soon become feasible to program bots to recognize value with something approaching the human mind.

Welcome back to Part II of our series on Magento SEO, derived from Yoast’s comprehensive coverage on their net hub. Last time, we covered the basics of configuration and technical SEO for Magento. Today we’ll cover templates and some advanced Magento SEO techniques to truly pump your sites’ optimization game to the next level. It may seem like a lot, but feel free to be incremental; as long as you’re careful, you can take these step-by-step if you need to.

Each element does some good on its own, and in tandem they constitute a powerfully grounded Magento SEO strategy. Let’s begin!

Magento Template Optimization

Skins

Magento’s out-of-the-box skins—“Default Theme”, “Blue Skin”, “Modern Theme”—aren’t all that header-friendly, so it’s in your best interest to seek out custom, blank themes with room for SEO elements.

Headings

You logo should be an <h1> on the front page and an <h3> thereafter. Basically, the content title should always be apparent as such. For example, on a product page, stick the actual name of the product in an <h1> tag. On category pages, reserve category names for <h1> and relegate included products to <h3>. This may seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how often this gets overlooked and how detrimental that can be.

On the flipside of the coin, overusing headings can hurt, too. Avoid them entirely in sidebars. There’s no reason to use <h4> tags for “static” or kewordless titles—use <strong> instead. And, of course, keep your content clean, organized, and relevant with the proper keywords.

Neaten Your Code

You’ve got to keep your templates clean! Move your JavaScript and CSS to external files; the more cluttered your templates, the worse your Magento SEO report card will be. The benefits? Users will be able to cache those files on the first load, and search engines usually won’t have to download them. Everybody wins!

Speed Up

Speaking of which, the daily amount of your pages a search engine can spider is directly proportional to the speed at which your shop loads. So how do you get faster?

1.    Enable caching via System -> Cache Management. Be sure to enable all caching features there.
2.    Don’t skimp on hosting/server configuration. MySQL and PHP opcode cache make a huge difference.

You’ll also want to reduce the number of external files, combining them wherever possible (Magento already combines most JavaScript files into one by default). Remember that each file visitors have to download requires their browser to create another connection to the webserver. A great place to start is with stylesheets, which the default template keeps separate in six different files. Go ahead and combine everything but print.css into one file.

Modules exist which make this process easier, and some will also compress and cache, as well. Know that these may require rewrite permission and/or .htaccess support.

Advanced Magento SEO

You’ve come this far—don’t give up on the final lap! From here on out, it’s all about eliminating duplicate content. Unfortunately, some of our natural tendencies translate to duplicate content on Magento, which is a huge no-no when search engine spiders come around. For example, if you’ve got a certain product, it’s reasonable to expect that its page’s URL might look something like:

www.example.com/product.html

Which is all fine and dandy, except what happens when you link to that page from a category page further up the hierarchy? Something like:

www.example.com/category1/product.html

Similarly, you may end up with even more instances of “duplicate content” in the eyes of search engines, pages like:

www.example.com/catalog/product/view/id/1
www.example.com/catalog/product/view/id/1/category/1

And that’s not even getting into product review subpages and the like. Long story short, this is a serious problem that falls under the radar of most casual Magento SEO campaigns. People create these issues because we all love layered navigation and other modern site practices that give more options to visitors; redundant options are eminently user-friendly, but they certainly aren’t SEO-friendly.

The answer? Set up your site to permit spidering instead of indexing, and adjust sorting/navigation. Here’s how:

Non-content Pages

For these pages, use the “Noindex, Follow” protocol. You’ll need a meta module or extension to do this. This way, search engines will follow all links on these pages, but it won’t index them in the process.

Don’t link to login, checkout, wishlist, or other non-content pages. The same goes for RSS feeds, layered navigation, add to wishlist, add to compare, or other buttons/features. Unfortunately, as of this writing, there’s no easy extension for this. You’ll have to go into your template files and manually add “nofollow” to these links yourself.

Canonical URLs

You’ll need an extension for this, as well. Use the new “canonical URL” tag to suggest your preferred version of the URL for each page, which helps search engines differentiate between sites it might otherwise label as duplicate content.

XML Sitemaps

This won’t help you rank, but it can speed up indexing because it makes it easier for search engines to find your content. You can create an XML sitemap manually by navigating to Catalog -> Google Sitemap -> Add Sitemap. From there, choose a file name, path, and store view, then press “Save and Generate”. To point search engines towards the sitemap, insert the following code in your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http://domain.com/sitemap.xml

NOTE: as your inventory changes, you’ll need to continually re-generate the XML sitemap. The best way to do that is via a cron job.

Wrapping Up

And that’s it, for now! Because this is an evolving field, expect Magento SEO tactics to change in the coming months and years. It’s about aligning with search engine parameters, after all. Plus, Magento being the open-source platform that it is, it’s highly possible that many of these are being incorporated into Magento core even now. Please get in touch with us if you have any questions, comments, or if you’d like to see what we can do for you in terms of a Magento SEO campaign. We’d be glad to help!

SEO! Magentians everywhere, those three letters should be the bedrock of your web strategy—they determine positioning, reception, marketing initiatives, and a host of other crucial undertakings for online businesses.

Chances are you’ve already done a fair bit of SEO, but even a cursory glance around the web shows a distinct lack of Magento SEO advice.

This is less than ideal.

Luckily, Yoast put together a dynamic overview of Magento concerns, tactics, and workarounds in the SEO realm! That’s right: as Magento evolves and best practices come into their own, Yoast will keep updating their piece to reflect the changing landscape. In the meantime, though, we’d like to put the spotlight on the existing, proving Magento SEO information. As the first article in a two-part series, this piece will cover Basic Optimization Strategies. The second part will delve more into issues with templates and advanced tips for a fully executed Magento SEO strategy. Let’s get to it!

Basic Technical SEO for Magento

General Configuration

Caveat: the following assumes that you’ve updated to the most recent Magento release. If you need to do so, check the Magento website for instructions on modernizing your platform.

Firstly, you should know that Magento gets cozy with search engines right off the bat. They take you most of the way there—but you need to address a few issues to achieve ideal optimization. Start by enabling Server URL rewrites under System -> Configuration -> Web -> Search Engine Optimization. On that same screen, under URL Options, set “Add store code to URLs” to “no” (in some rare cases, you might want a “yes” here—feel free to contact us if you’re unsure and we can give a more informed answer).

Under Unsecure/Secure, you’ll be able to set your preferred domain in the “Base URL” field. Basically, this lets you opt between www and non-www versions for your URLs. NOTE: this won’t automatically redirect from one to the other. To do that, create a 301 redirect through .htaccess with mod_rewrite; this has the additional benefit of preventing Magento from adding the SID query to your URLs. You’ll want to make sure the Base URL is the same as the redirect. The following code can be added when editing .htaccess to redirect index.php to root:

[around line 119]

1    RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /index.php HTTP/
2    RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.mydomain.com/ [R=301,L]

Alternatively, if you Magento install is in the sub-directory http://www.mydomain.com/magento/ instead of the root:=

1    RewriteBase /magento/ RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /magento/index.php HTTP/
2    RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.mydomain.com/magento/ [R=301,L]

Header Settings

Magento automatically outfits you with “Magento Commerce” as a page title. You don’t have to just leave that, do something about it! In general, live by this mantra: “early words count more”. Not only do search engines put more weight on the first few words, visitors often can’t be bothered to read the entire line when they’re in a hurry. So stick your keywords up front!

To change the default title, navigate to Configuration -> Design -> HTML Head. Be descriptive and concise with this title; it’ll be used for your non-content pages without custom titles (e.g., “Contact Us”). Use the “Title Suffix” field to add your store name to all pages, should you desire.

Just a few more things to clean up your site. To save space in your title, leave “Prefix”, “Default Description”, and “Default Keywords” empty. Also, if you want to prevent indexing of the site (say, for a non-production environment), it may be useful to set “Default Robots” to “NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”—otherwise, it should definitely be set to “INDEX, FOLLOW”.

Another great way to improve Magento SEO on page headers is to add new canonical tags, available through various extensions on Magento Connect. NOTE: Magento has a tendency to turn non-set meta robots into meta tags, as in:

<meta name="robots" content="*" />

If this happens, you should remove these empty metas from your code to avoid troubling search engine behavior.

CMS Pages

Magento favors simple CMS, which usually suffices for most purposes in terms of scope, flexibility, and page aspect control. Keeping in mind the search-engine friendly tips above, fill each CMS page with well-written content, select a URL Identifier and Page Title, and pen a corresponding description. You can keep “Keywords” empty.

Remember that the description is the human element: it should entice clicks when presented in search engine results, so be sure to grab their attention with a straightforward hook. Do not resort to auto-generation. This shows up far too often and is fairly obvious to most savvy searchers. You’ve seen it before: two or three random snippets with bolded keywords, separated by ellipses. Distinguish your efforts with readable descriptions.

Category Optimization

Magento also defaults to adding category names to paths for product URLs, which has the unfortunate side effect of creating (often-penalized) duplicate content issues for search engines. To disable this function, set “use category paths for URLs” under System -> Configuration -> Catalog -> Search Engine Optimization to “no”.

To set details by category, navigate to Catalog -> Manage Categories. The most important fields are:

•    Meta Description – again, an attractive description that humans would want to read.
•    Page Title – keep this empty so that parent categories will populate in your titles. If you customize here, Magento will use your exact entry without including parent categories.
•    URL Key – again, short and keyword-rich! Drop articles (a, an, the) and other space-wasters. If you cater to multiple languages, you should keep this language-independent.

Product Optimization

This follows a similar procedure to Category Optimization. You’ll be able to set meta information for “Default Values” and for each “Store View”. NOTE: for “Meta Title”, custom entries will overwrite the complete page title except for prefixes/suffixes, not just the product name.

Images need love, too! Both alt tags and image file names contribute to search engine success in the big picture. Not only that, visitors using screen readers will then be able to have a good idea of what’s in front of them.

By default, images will be renamed with the product title, which also populates the “Title” and “Alt Tag” fields. It may take some effort, but it’s ultimately worthwhile to reset these for each image. You should know that you can also set the label for each product image (including alt and title tag) in the “Images” tab under Product Information. This applies to specified Store Views, as well.

That’s it for Now!

Be sure to check out Hara Partners’ page on Magento SEO—lots of useful information to be found there!

Read on for more advanced Magento SEO tips and tricks.

When your customers are searching for your product online it’s essential for your website to appear on the first page of the search, preferably somewhere near the top. If that’s not the case your company might as well not exist. Few customers are willing to delve into the nether region that is the second page of Google results. The only way to keep your business on top is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Proper Magento SEO is the absolute surefire way to increase traffic and customer conversion for your store.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a way for companies to stay on top (figuratively and literally) of Google’s search results. Google uses crawling tools called “spiders” that scour the web 24/7 looking for content and ranking it based on relevance in order to return the most optimum search results. As an etailer you want your company to be at the top of that list for every type of product that you deal in.

Since every business is unique with a diverse product base picking the right target search terms you want to dominate is essential. Not only are you competing with similar businesses but the entire internet so in order to get into the top search results your SEO strategy needs to be consistent and refined. Fortunately Hara Partners has developed and extensive Magento SEO package for our customers.

We use the latest Google Analytics tools to determine the optimal strategy tailored specifically to your business. Once we hammer out that strategy we implement it using Webmaster integration tools, site configuration, and the Magento Google Merchant feed. By choosing Hara Partners as your primary Magento SEO provider your business will be ahead of the game and you should see an instant increase in customer conversions. To find out more about our Magento SEO tools visit harapartners.com