Preface

Optimizing a Magento website can be rather tricky at times, especially when we try to figure out how best to optimize a specific phrase on a particular page while we navigate over 15,000 files and hundreds of different configuration settings.

It can sometimes seem a little daunting, but thankfully, it's not all that bad.

Magento has been built by people who have as much passion about your website as they do about their own software, and as such, they are always looking to improve the internal optimization of their platform.

They've already provided us with a variety of tools that we can use to better prepare our Magento store for search engines. Not only this, but due to the open source nature of the Magento platform, there exists a growing community of developers and SEO specialists who constantly innovate and experiment with different ways to improve the framework.

Like any good e-commerce content management system, Magento allows us to adjust certain elements of each product, category, and CMS page features such as titles, meta information, and headings. Magento is rather good at delivering these simple SEO requirements.

It has, however, its SEO shortcomings, and this book will teach you how to tackle some of the most common issues that may arise.

I hope that with this book, you'll be able to make use of all the tools Magento has provided for you as well as implement some of the more advanced SEO techniques. You should also be able to repair several of those unfortunate SEO flaws that are, to be fair, inherent within almost all large open source frameworks.

The primary goal of optimizing our Magento website—and one that we must always keep at the forefront of our minds—is to enhance the experience for both our customers and search engines.

A better experience for both will give us the best possible chance of increasing our number of visitors, converting those visitors into customers, and boosting the overall sales figures for our Magento website.