A Complete Guide to Title Tags in Magento

As you may already know, the title tag is one of the most important on-page elements for SEO. The title tag is as the word indicates the title of the page (If you dont know about title tags, read this article on how to write good title tags). Magento does not optimize the title tags by default and you should make some basic changes to insure that your site is properly search engine optimized.  Making these changes can significantly impact your key word ranking.

Adding A Title Tag Suffix or Prefix

SEO best practices dictate that you should include your website name at the end of your title tag. This is really very important for brands who have retailers competing for their keywords and because it also helps with branding.

You might see a title tag like this:

#Important Keywords# | #Brand Name#

To get set up your store title tag suffix or prefix navigate to in Magneto to:

System > Configuration  > Design and add your prefix or suffix, in our example

| Magento SEO

For CMS Pages – Change the Title Tag via XML layout

Once you have added a title tag suffix, Magento will append this title tags for all the pages of your site. If you have some pages you don’t want the suffix to be included on, such as the home page, you can overwrite it by using XML layouts.

For example, if your homepage is a CMS page, you should navigate to the page and go to Design > Custom Layout Update XML. 

In the custom layout field insert the following code:

<reference name=”head”>

<action method=”setForcedTitle”><title>Account Dashboard</title></action>

</reference>

For Category and Product Pages – Change the Title Tag in the Backend

Simply navigate to the category and product page you want to update and type in the title tag field.