Magento SEO (search engine friendly Magento shopping cart)
Social Media aspects are coming to Magento… you will soon be able to use your Facebook page to showcase products in your Magento ecommerce site using this plugin.
Magento SEO Update 2/11/2009: More activity with SEO and Magento, with some SEO developers trying to make a name for themselves in the Magento space. See below.
Magento SEO Update 11/4/2008: Magento SEO is actively evolving, and SEO links (SEO resources for those working with Magento ecommerce) are now listed down below.
It’s never too early to be looking at SEO aspects of Magento, the new Open Source commerce application (shopping cart). Theyare still in beta but quite advanced, and search engine friendly issues have been addressed a few times in the Magento SEO forum, and in the “SEO group” and on the Magento site. There’s a video clip from November describing the rewrite system as very flexible, because in SEO, “every seo has his own opinion”.
Much of the SEO discussion is very basic, and there is pitifully low activity on real SEO. Someone on the China magneto forum posted a spider view back in November, before the latest SEO friendliness was incorporated. There is more SEO discussion in China than on the main site as well. However, the framework is quite capable and the meta tag management is as I would expect it to be for a modern, flexible PHP framework.
Maybe it’s time to dig in and flex the SEO friendliness and Magento’s “built in flexibility”?
I’d like to connect with anyone else looking into Magento and SEO, or anyone attempting effective deployment of Magento at this stage (non-production assumed) with respect to search marketing. The online demo site is not looking so good, but given the level of SEO discussion so far I didn’t expect it to be optimized. That said, this Chinese demo is not looking so good either, and they did have a bit more Magento SEO discussions.
Magento SEO Resources
Still plenty of misunderstanding of SEO issues in the Magento community and here. and here.
Some SEO advice is appearing, even though it is brute-force also see here and here.
There is some SEO awareness showing up on the Magento template design forums and even early signs of web sites dedicated to optimizing Magento for search engines.
BlueAcorn has published a good blog post about SEO and Magento, paying attention to the strategic issues that I find matter most when considering search marketing. Their ecommerce experience shows, as this kind of post is much better than the typical “SEO for Magento” blog post.
This is funny. I’ve been watching Google struggle with the new term “Magento” for almost a year. It seems there is enough mis-typing of comic book character Magneto (the freak who can manipulate magnetic fields) in the corpus Google indexes, that Google assigned Magento as a synonym of Magneto (do a Google search with ~Magento and you’ll see it). Even to this day Magento hasn’t defined itself enough in the world to overpower the Magneto typos!
Wordpress SEO promotor Joost DeValk is moving into the Magento space now with a canonicalization extension he specified, putting his Yoast brand onto it. He didn’t write it, and it isn’t perfect, but he’s apparently collaborating with a PHP coder comfortable with Magento. Joost told me the coder will be guest blogging for him with more Magento code in the future. This initial code was prepared with some advance awareness of the new canonical tag sponsored by search engines, and is already listed in the MagentoConnect system under SEO.
January 29th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
Looks very promising. Hopefully this will be a viable alternative to the dinosaur carts (osCommerce and Zen Cart) that we’ve been stuck with for so long….
January 30th, 2008 at 10:29 am
Considering the amount of junk we have out there, it is a blessing. You should see the sites of ecommerce clients coming through the door. This is an improvement over the whole site.
@mert: It’s too easy to make something look promising these days… it takes days just to get to the meat of the issues and many don’t bother untilit’s too late to turn back (or so they think). The codebase here looks very impressive to me so far. I know a number of guys who can probably make this do amazing things for a fraction of the cost of a custom cart and with all the benefits of Open Source support. That’s still not cheap, but it is cheap compared to what it really costs to do things right these days.
January 30th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
I fully agree John. I have never used these guys, but I would rather start with this base and get it to a designer than teach a designer how to do SEO friendly ecommerce sites. I am planning to do that with my next ecommerce client as a matter of fact. Let’s see how stable it is and how much we can tweak it.
January 31st, 2008 at 11:32 pm
Hey John, Dave here…. just thought I would mention that my web dev team is starting to look into this one. Over the last few weeks they have been playin with it on a Dev Server. ( I own a development firm as well as the SEO stuff).
I haven’t looked into it yet personally, but we have some ex-OSC folks working for us and the goal is potentially a live production site. If you want, get in touch and I can let you know what I come up with.. or we can put together some recommendations if you care that much.
… drop me a line if U want.
Dave
March 20th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
also see newer post SEO for Magento
June 25th, 2008 at 9:59 am
Hi John,
I like your blog, nice work. We’re taking a hard look at Magneto, and have liked what we’ve seen thus far. One of the only drawbacks I’ve seen is the page load time on the demo site. Might that be because it is a demo, or do you think it’s something larger?
Regards,
Justin
@Justin: Thanks for the compliment. As for Magento, I have worked with many good PHP/MySQL people in the past, so I generally assume that any poor performance issues with an out of the box Open Source platform can and will be addressed when cost effective (which may mean “when I need it fixed”). I see plenty of references to Magento being slow, and a few of successful use of caching and MySQL tweaking to improve performance. Without looking further, I’d say it is what it is… a 1.0 production version of a new open source ecommerce platform, with a ton of promise and bright future.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:55 am
I´m working with Magento for more than a year. The results are really good. Magento is well designed and full of useful features. But one of the most important things. Magento is very search engine friendly: speaking URLs, XML-Sitemap, optimizes Source Code, editable Metatags etc.
If you´re planning a new online-store, Magento is definitely worth a test…
Editor’s Note: Sorry, that blog looks like spam to me, so no link.
February 3rd, 2009 at 4:11 am
Yes, Many of our clients much concerned about SEO of Magento Website. The Clients wants us to do but the SEO is is quite undefined by Magento and hard to do it by Programmer.
We are showing them to hire SEO Company or Consultant to do that but now we are trying to develop our own strategy.
The thing is Search Engine is main source of Traffic and this is purely product based website which can not work without Traffic.
There are lots of website on net and if we can not prove our self to search engine no body will find us…
so it is necessary if Magento come up with SEO Solution..
May 18th, 2009 at 6:36 am
Hey John,
Nice collection of SEO resources for Magento, it’s nice to see the SEO community starting to evolve around the platform. We recently put together a few additional tweaks that we integrate into our Magento themes that might be a good resource to add to your list. Magento SEO Development.
Now that we’ve added the Magento blog to our site in addition to our existing eCommerce blog, you’ll be sure to see more articles like that from us in the future as well.