Resolve non-WWW & WWW problem
First, you have to login at the admin panel of your Magento Website. Go to System > Configuration > Web. You will notice some options in the right hand side space at your screen. Expand the option titled ‘Search Engine Optimization’.
Select Yes for ‘Use Web Server Rewrites’. It will allow Magento to use the rewrites done through mod_rewriter in .htaccess. Now, open your .htaccess file and add following code into it:
For redirecting www to non-www
RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.sample.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://sample.com/$1 [R=301,L]For redirecting non-www to www,
RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^sample.com$ RewriteRule (.*) http://www.sample.com$1 [R=301]Change in Magento Configuration
Come back to System > Configuration >Web in Magento Admin panel. Expand the options ‘Unsecure’ & ‘Secure’. Following is a screenshot of the same:
Both of the options have similar points, but we have to deal with the Base URL that is the URL of your Magento online store. Here, you have to enter the preferred non-www or www URL for which you have changed the .htaccess file. Check the URLs again carefully in both options. Click on ‘Save Config’ button in the top right side.
Redirecting the index.php URLs to Root
By default, the path of Magento Admin Panel will be http://www.example.com/index.php/admin. It is not recommended to have this path or any other path through index.php for security reasons. You can redirect the index.php URLs to root with the following code in .htaccess. RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /index.php HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.example.com/ [R=301,L] If you want to make change for sub-directory install of Magento then use following code: RewriteBase /magento/ RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /magento/index.php HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.mydomain.com/magento/ [R=301,L]Default Option – Not to be changed
Go to System > Configuration > Web and select URL Options.
This option helps you to add or remove the Store Code in the URLs. Mostly it has No. You can modify the other option ‘Auto-redirect to Base URL’ on your requirement.
Go to System > Configuration > Catalog, you will see a list of options in the right hand side. Click on Sitemap, this will look like following.
Magento automatically creates a sitemap and provides above option to modify the sitemap. You can have a tree structured sitemap and also increase the minimum lines per page. The default value is 30 and after that, a new page will be created inside sitemap.
HTML Header Settings
Magento gives the title ‘Magento Commerce’ to your store by default. You can change the default title, add an icon, and have prefix etc. in Configuration for better responses from search engines. For this, go to System > Configuration > Design > HTML Head. It will look like as following for new installation.
We suggest you to create a good title explaining your store working and to include keywords in it. These keywords will become the primary keywords and get more preference from search engines. In addition, you can add a favicon of your store to do brand awareness among visitors. This will again promote your logo, Store Company and Website.
In addition, you can add the store name in the “Title Suffix”. This will add the store name at all pages on your Website. For example, adding ‘Shopper’ will make the title of a content page as below:
Blog Example Magento Online Store | Shopper
If you want to keep your Magento Online hidden from search engines then change the Default Robots to ‘NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW’ else stay with ‘INDEX, FOLLOW’ to get indexed.Resolving Canonical URL problem
Two URLs will be canonical when there is a different between their structures. For example, following are canonical URLs:- www.example-magento.com/blog/
- www.example-magento.com/blog
- http://www.example-magento.com/blog
- http://www.example-magento.com/blog/
Meta Robots
Magento is a Content Management System that evolves and expands dynamically during its regular course of working. Due to this dynamism, few pages are created eventually either these are temporary in nature or does not required to be indexed. Few examples are Category Pages, Search Result Pages, Feeds, Login and Register Pages, and other error pages. The indexing of these pages can effect the ranking of your Website. So, it is required to disable their indexing. You can use following extensions to control the robots.txt and handle the indexing of non-content pages. We suggest you to use any one of above.Search Engine Optimization
Visit System > Config > Catalog and you will find an exciting option named Search Engine Optimization.
You can configure it as per requirement.
Google Sitemap
In Catalog section there is a useful option Google Sitemap. Magento does not require you to do efforts in creating a sitemap. It will do automatically and gives you an option to submit this sitemap to Google. Visit System > Config > Catalog > Google Sitemap for this option. This will look like below:
Select the frequency of updates in Products, CMS Pages, and Categories. If it is the new store then Categories will added on daily basis else on any other basis. We suggest you to select the actual frequency on which you can update the opted section. If you are selecting Daily frequency for CMS Pages then you have to update it on daily basis. Do you know why? Google will visit your Website on the prescribed frequency, check for changes, index them and develop its database to show your product/pages/categories in its search engine result pages (SERPs). If it does not detect any change then it can throw an error resulting into low Page Rank.
excellent post as i was looking for tips to boost the SEO of my Magento web store. Thanks a lot for this great contribution..!
Free Magento themes? anyone? i need such free themes for better SEO by utilizing the tips give above..