I work for an SEO company and I though I would mention a fact about headings that came to mind as I was looking at the source produced by Magento.
Magento places the logo with the company name in an H1 tag and the actual heading on the page in an H3 tag. For SEO purposes, this is incorrect.
H1 tags carry the most weight when it comes to SEO and the first H1 tag on the page is the most important. This tag should be something that indicates what the page is about which means, the H1 tag should be the page heading and not the company name. In fact, there should only be one H1 tag on any page and it should always be the page title. The company name is insignificant and should be put in anything but an H1 tag. We don’t even use a heading tag at all for the company name.
If you want Magento to produce SEO’d pages then you might want to change this.
Magento might want to get someone that is an SEO expert to point out further improvements. I’m sure I’ll find more… which worries me.
But that’s not me. I am a developer and only know some things about SEO as I have to usually alter page coding in order to implement SEO plans that have been created by those experts where I am employed.
This seems to be a good product (even if I find it over complicated and extremely difficult to implement a design) and the reason that I am checking it out is to evaluate if this is something we want to offer to our clients. I can tell you now that if we did use it I would have to go into the code, figure out where those headings are generated and change it… which likely means that I would be loosing the ability to update the product. Would be much easier if I did not need to make these types of changes to the logic.
It’s in the template file, right? I changed that right off.
The other thing they need to do in the default theme is put the content first instead of after all the menus. This is usually accomplished with the css making the left sidebar appear left, but in the html it really follows the middle column.
There should be more control over the nofollow attribute of the links too, so you don’t have to find every little link in the template files and change it to have nofollow for the no-value pages you don’t want to pass pagerank to (like Compare, Wishlist, My Account, Checkout, Terms, Contact Us and on and on).
Yes exactly H1 should be text. Logo will be image and we have Image tag to put in it. Morover we can optimize that image to with alt tag but as i have been working as SEO from last some time i will strongly recommend magenta to not add logo in H1 tag.
Well, if you don’t like company logo uses H1 tag, you can always change it yourself - this is not a rocket science but a 1+1 =2 simple math
I don’t do SEO and don’t charge client for SEO Optimization - it’s a default for semantical markup with respect of layout and code. In most case H1 can be better served for the most important keywords, but that is not iron rule, under some circumstance, H1 tag is perfect for company logo.
Google bot respects sites that respect and practise semantical markup, use of web standards. Yahoo had introduced semantic web support in May I think. MSN, if not already done so, likely will catch up.
does any one know how can i use layers for the header so that i use text and then hide it with logo above it .
read somewhere that this could be a good option for SEO
I am confused, what do I need to alter in the template for magento to work better with SEO?
First and formost assuming you are aware that SEO is an ongoing process (not something you do once on your ecommerce system or cms) and most work is done in off page factors not on page factors - it is on the on page factors we are talking about changing with Magento template changes.
I will comment on what we have done - opinions differ on many things seo related and things change all the time - so please keep in mind this is what we have done and NOT a total recommendation you will need to do your own research / employ your own SEO folks who MAY do things differently.
1) Exclude certain urls from being indexed via robots.txt exclusion
2) Have included the nofollow attribute on many of the internal links, such as:
a) Layered navigation
b) Category view filters
c) My account, cart links
d) Shopping basket
e) Comparison feature
3) Excluded category names from urls.
4) Make sure each category and product page has their own detailed meta description tag.
5)A few other smaller template changes.
All of the above really focus on excluding the search engines from indexing duplicate content that is produced with all of the different views, layered navigation etc. etc etc.
Again this just covers SOME of the on page factors of SEO (NOTE not all) and excludes the off page factors which are an ongoing never ending process. Having a good search engine friendly system is just a base it will NOT get you good rankings without the additional work.
