My slides from the Magento LDN meetup on the 16th of August 2012.

1. An SEO’s Guide to Magento
Commerce
By Paul Rogers
Head of Digital Marketing for GPMD

2. Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
Secondary keyword target Primary keyword target • I always optimise title tags with a
primary and secondary keyword
target
• The focus should also be on providing
a compelling proposition
• Include call to actions and selling
points
• The objective for your meta
description should be to provide a
more compelling proposition than
your competitors

3. Redirects & Rewrite rules
• Ensure that you’re using 301 redirects instead
of 302 redirects
• Where possible, redirect pages to a relevant
alternative
• Don’t redirect things for the sake of it
• Remember to redirect query strings &
pagination too
• Think about hooks for rewrite rules before you
need to

4. URL Structure
• Avoid duplicate variations of the same page
• Top-level products
• Use directories and file extensions to help with rewrite rules and GA
filters
• Don’t overuse keywords for the sake of it
THIS:
paulsmith.co.uk/shop/paul-smith-wallets-443/paul-smith-wallets-damson-saffiano-leather-
billfold-waller-agxa-1032-w270-d/product.html
SHOULD BE:
paulsmith.co.uk/shop/damson-saffiano-leather-billfold-waller-agxa-1032-w270-d.html

5. Pagination
Use rel=next and rel= prev to prevent Google from indexing paginated versions of
pages
You can use our SEOpack plugin to implement this.

6. Avoid Unnecessary 404s
• Apply 301 redirects to transfer value
• Apply 302 redirects if they’ve been
temporarily taken down
• 404s can significantly reduce rankings
• Orphan redundant categories and products

7. Performance / Speed
• Jpeg Mini – super image compression
• Minimizing CSS & JS
• Using Mod_Pagespeed
• We’re looking into full-page caching – Inviqa
have already done this so contact them for
questions

8. Catalogue Search Pages
Disallow the /catalogsearch/
directory in the robots.txt file
and do a removal requst for the
folder in GWT

9. Dealing with layered navigation

10. Turning Dynamic Pages into Static
Turned valueless pages into static landing
pages
/brands/breitling-
watches.html?gender=17052
/brands/breitling-watches/mens.html
/brands/breitling-watches/navitimer-
collection.html

11. Sitemaps
• Where possible, ecommerce sites should have
xml & html sitemaps
• Video sitemaps
• Brand / segmented sitemap pages

12. Link Building
• Link building has evolved post-penguin
• Context is king!
• Editorial links are safest and most valuable

13. Thank you for listening!
Feel free to email any questions to
paul@gpmd.co.uk!
Our SEOpack Module:
magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/gpmd-seopack-9820.html
I also wrote this blog post about Magento SEO:
gpmd.co.uk/blog/a-guide-to-doing-seo-on-magento-websites