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Monday, July 16, 2012

Magento SEO

Magento SEO – URLs Rewrite Management Feature


         Search engine friendly URLs became a very important ranking factor for all ecommerce websites. The URL Rewrite Management is one of my favourite Magento SEO tools. It allows you to change (re-write) dynamically generated URL like http://www.kabiri.co.uk/catalog/product/view/id/7828/category/568 to the search engine friendly URL like this one http://www.kabiri.co.uk/jewellery-1/necklaces/radio-star-necklace.html. By using this brilliant Magento SEO tool you can easily create URLs which include all most important and relevant keywords.

Note: Remember to disallow indexing of original URLs by search engine spiders in the robots.txt exclusion file. This ensures that there’s only one version of Magento URL indexed by search engines.

Magento SEO – URL keys / URL identifiers



Magento allows you to specify the URL key (also known as the URL identifier) on every static, content and product category page, see below:

This means that you can choose the keyword you want and add it to the particular page’s URL independently from the Magento page name.

Another great thing is that all Magento URLs included in this path will automatically have their URL structure updated at the same time, For example, you don’t have to worry about URLs within the /necklaces/ path when you change the category’s URL key to /designer-necklaces/ – Magento will automatically update it to include the /designer-necklaces/.

Note: Once you decide to change the URL key, you need to find websites and pages which link to previous versions of those URLs (you can use Google Webmaster Central to identify them) and redirect those old URLs to ne w URLs.

Magento SEO – Canonical Link Elements Extension


 
This is my favourite Magento SEO extension – http://yoast.com/tools/magento/canonical/. It tells the search engine which URL it should have for the current Magento page.

The extension is useful when removing duplicate content issues relating to listings page pagination, when every page, e.g. ‘?p=1’, ‘?p=2’, etc., have the same title and meta description.

This fantastic Magento SEO tool also solves the common problem of many ecommerce platforms whereby one product is placed in many categories. This creates exact copies of the page on several URLs. The canonical link elements SEO extension tells search engines to treat every Magento product page as if it lived in the root category (not classified in any category), e.g. this URL http://www.kabiri.co.uk/jewellery-1/necklaces/masque-pendant-yellow-gold.html has a canonical link element which shortens the URL for search engines – http://www.kabiri.co.uk/masque-pendant-yellow-gold.html.


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