Does the SEO of a Magento website need to be a little more cultured and technical?

There are a few areas to consider when optimising a Magento site. With its rapid expansion and recent acquisition by Ebay, it is perhaps time to learn a little more. Generally speaking, it would appear that there is more to consider when optimising an e-commerce platform such as magento. In this post I will refer to Magento sites and some food for thought in terms of their optimisation.

Some ‘back to basics’ might include the general configuration. Firstly, goes without saying, use the most recent release of the software. In the head, full Magento URL’s are automatically external links, therefore we would remove the full URL’s and use such as ‘/js/scripts.js ‘. Optimising top level categories – Magento allows the ability to add the name of the categories for the path of the product URL’s. We should combine style sheets where possible in an effort to further reduce the coding.

Shop load speed is a ranking factor and a couple of things might help it initiate faster. Enable caching by going into the ‘system’ and the ‘cache management settings’. Also, good host and server configuration, MySQL offers a built in configuration parameter known as query_cache_size. This directive tells the MySQL server to store the result of the query in memory, much faster than accessing from disk. This does of course depend on the amount of memory available to our MySQL database server.

We need also to mention the duplicate content. It is necessary to prevent the indexing of all non-content pages using noindex, follow attribute. This of course allows links within the page to be followed but the page not appear in the index. We should nofollow unnecessary links such as ‘login’, ‘checkout’, and ‘wishlist’ etc. The Base URL, found under ‘Unsecure’ and ‘Secure, is where we can set the preferred domain. This is a method of canonicalising our domain but it is a request rather than a command. It is still necessary to 301 redirect with the .htaccess file to redirect to the root to prevent several versions of the same page being available. Using the canonical link element or canonical URL tag, will help the search engines understand the duplicate pages by indicating which is our preferred version of the URL.

This week’s post looks at installing the conversion tracking code onto a Magento Ecommerce site. Conversion tracking can be used to track multiple results such as contact form completion or viewing of a particular page relating to your PPC. In the Magento instance it is tracking how many clicks convert into a sale that is the conversion most likely to be tracked.

The major benefit of using a conversion code with an ecommerce site is it allows you to be able to know which keywords draw the most sales to your site. With this data you can utilise conversion based bidding which reallocates your budget to the keywords providing sales and removes it from those which aren’t. Through this process you are able to continuously improve your return on investment.

For the earlier versions of Magento there is a module you can download from Magento Connect which you simply install, refresh your cache, go to system and then configuration and finally Google API. Once there you should see a panel called ‘Google Adwords – Conversion Tracking’. Set enable in this panel to yes and enter your conversion ID (this is the code generated when you set up the conversion tracking in the Adwords platform). Set the language and conversion value and save.

However newer versions of Magento do not support this module so you have to go about it slightly differently. Open up the proceeding file within your Magento installation by following this path:

app>design>frontend>base>default>checkout>success.phtml

Then paste the conversion code generated by adwords on the bottom of the success page as demonstrated in the below image:

Your Adwords will now track conversions from you Magento Ecommerce site so you can gain the best ROI available for your campaign.

Hi and welcome to this weeks SEO video tutorial, we are following on from last weeks Google analytics setup video and showing how to set up the eCommerce setting for a Magento ecommerce shop.

The eCommerce setting is vital for traffic analysis on eCommerce websites, the settings provide the following information:

• Amount of transactions made
• Value of the transactions
• Best selling products
• Most profitable products
• Traffic sources to individual products
• Conversion rates

Once your logged into your Google analytics account, you can see your website profile. Click the edit button.

You can see the website information and it says eCommerce website no. Click the edit button. The two setting that need changing are the currency and the ecommerce setting. Then save changes.

For the second part of the installation you will need to log into the administration area of your Magento shop.

Before going to magento, make a note of your Google API tracking number. Once logged in you will need to go to system, configuration, Google API.

Enable the Google analytic setting and copy your Google API into the box and click save.

So, that’s the initial setup complete. Now we would suggest that you complete a couple of test transactions to ensure that it is reporting correctly.

Be aware that it can take up to 24 hours to for the eCommerce tab to appear in Google analytics. Thanks for watching.