SEO for e-Commerce. Some Useful On-Site Tips for Your Magento Website Promotion

Creation of a website is never a final step in moving your business to digital. In fact, it’s just a first step along brave new world of digital marketing. Today we will uncover basics of On-Site SEO for your e-commerce website.

Indexation. Vast amount e-shops have same issue of getting their content to index. Of course, sooner or later Google will be filled with search results from your site (you can always check it with following command in search bar – “site:[your site]” or “site:[your site]`” for clear results). But would those be useful pages leading to all of your products? For example filters on your website can generate thousands of pages with almost same content, which due to their URL changes (with parameters like “?value=x”) will be concerned as unique for search engines, causing a clear content duplication. Also receiving same content again and again from different URLs search crawlers may simply not reach other parts of your website.

To avoid this you should correctly setup both robots.txt and sitemap.xml files. Sitemap.xml is always an individual case so it’s hard to give some universal recommendations (except need to create few sitemaps if you have over 50k pages). With regards to robots here is a standard example for your Magento website:

User-agent: *
## Explanation: you exclude development files and folders
Disallow: /CVS
Disallow: /*.svn$
Disallow: /*.idea$
Disallow: /*.sql$
Disallow: /*.tgz$
## Explanation: you exclude checkout and user account pages
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /onestepcheckout/
Disallow: /customer/
Disallow: /customer/account/
Disallow: /customer/account/login/
Disallow: /trade-account/
Disallow: /wishlist/
## Explanation: you exclude links with session IDs
Disallow: /*?SID=*
## Explanation: you exclude search pages and some modules
Disallow: /catalogsearch/
Disallow: /catalog/product_compare/
Disallow: /feefo/
Disallow: /sendfriend/
Disallow: /sales/guest/form/
Disallow: /customer/account/login/
## Explanation: you exclude sub category pages that are sorted or filtered
Disallow: */*?dir*
Disallow: */*?mode*
Disallow: */*?cat*
Disallow: */*?min=*
Disallow: */*?max=*
Disallow: */*?limit=*
## Explanation: you exclude technical folders
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /downloader/
Disallow: /errors/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /pkginfo/
Disallow: /shell/
Disallow: /var/
## Explanation: you exclude common Magento files
Disallow: /api.php
Disallow: /cron.php
Disallow: /cron.sh
Disallow: /error_log
Disallow: /get.php
Disallow: /install.php
Disallow: /LICENSE.html
Disallow: /LICENSE.txt
Disallow: /LICENSE_AFL.txt
Disallow: /README.txt
Disallow: /RELEASE_NOTES.txt
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /

Uniqueness. Above we already raised a problem of content uniqueness for your website. Indeed, it is hard to get a better positions if you have exactly same Meta data on every page or content like all of you competitors have. But how can you provide unique content for thousands of products on your store? Here are some tips on it:

Semantic core. Both content creation and work with meta data should start on a semantic core basement. If you’re not a monopolist in the niche, we can assume that there already are some opponents ranking high for some big head KWs. Before 2012 this would mean for you that you simply need to get more links to achieve his positions, but lately situation has significantly changed and targeting exact KW may take months (if not years!) with a high risk of getting penalty for aggressive link-building campaign. So a much smarter solution would be creation of a wide semantic core (which for most e-commerce starts with 2k+ units) and target only those that have a low compete level.

Sublinking. Another practice that has changed these days is sublinking. Basic recommendations here are usage of a wide anchor list (don’t forget to gather semantics) and organic way of pasting such links (crawlers will easily catch artificial KW oriented anchors so try to make them exactly like you’d do a link without thinking of gaining rankings).

Technical recommendations. At the end we’d like to remind you about some things for your developers: