The following is a write-up of the contents of my new Magento book “Magento Search Engine Optimization” published January 2014. I’ll highlight some of the key areas from various chapters and also give a shout-out to some of the companies and individuals who have been mentioned within the book.
Magento Search Engine Optimization – Packt – Amazon UK – Amazon USA
As per my previous post “Writing for Packt“, I was approached to write this specific title. Magento SEO is something that I have been passionate about for many years now and our company have always been actively researching and developing new ways to better optimise our eCommerce SEO packages.
As this book was limited to just under 100 pages I decided to focus the content on the “on-site” optimisation of a Magento store – rather than branching out into the wider areas of SEO such as link-building/keyword research etc. There are a few exceptions to that rule (such as the Google Analytics chapter) but essentially the book is focused around the CMS and code-base of Magento CE.
Magento SEO Breakdown
The following is a breakdown of the chapters within the book and what I wanted to get across for each section.
Chapter 1 – Preparing and configuring your Magento website
General concepts for optimising an e-commerce store are covered here as well as configuring the SEO-specific options that Magento provides within a default installation. This chapter is mainly aimed at people new to the Magento platform.
Chapter 2 – Product & Category Page Optimization
Looking closer at how best to optimise product and category pages. This chapter deals mainly with titles, descriptions, content and also product schema integration.
Chapter 3 – Managing Internationalization & Multiple Languages
This short-ish chapter looks at Magento websites featuring multiple website/store views. The pro’s and con’s of the different setups that can be achieved using Magento and a few tips and tricks on how to avoid duplicate-content across multiple URLs.
Chapter 4 – Template/Design Adjustments for SEO and CRO
Looking closer at the individual templates that make up a Magento page and how we can optimise our HTML structure to better present content to both search engines and customers. Specially this chapter deals with other types of schema (breadcrumb / organisation) and also heading structure across different page-types.
Chapter 5 – Speeding up your Magento website
Speed is most certainly a ranking factor for search engines. A faster website means a better user-experience and this chapter looks at ways in which we can use Magento’s in-built configuration to speed up the loading times of our pages. We also look at far more advanced methods of caching our pages such as Varnish Cache.
Chapter 6 – Analyzing and Tracking your visitors
Dipping into Google Analytics, this chapter provides a short tour of the new functionality that is available once e-commerce tracking has been enabled. It also covers a few tips and techniques for producing reports using filters and advanced segments.
Chapter 7 – Technical Rewrites for Search Engines
Probably one of the most useful chapters in the book from a developer perspective. This chapter looks at several .htaccess snippets that should help to maintain URL consistency across the entire Magento website. There’s also a tutorial on how to resolve layered-navigation duplicate content similar to my recent article.
Chapter 8 – Purpose built Magento Extensions for SEO/CRO
The final section is a quick run-down on some of the best extensions out there. A few key points from each, their prices and where to download them. There are also a few mentions for noteworthy extension developers.
Acknowledgements
Within this book I have linked to many resources and featured many extension developers all of whom have contributed massively to Magento’s growing community. I’d like to take a minute to thank a few select people who have really helped contribute to the book:
- James Bavington, Sarah Edwards, Andrew Allen – all employees at Creare who have either sense-checked the content for me or continuously bombarded me with Magento-related SEO problems whilst writing it (you know who you are). A big thank you!
- Adam Moss – CreareSEO would never have been launched without this guys help.
- RocketWeb – Upon hearing about their Google Shopping Feed extension being featured in the book they are now very generously offering customers $50 off the price of their extension ($199) for those who have bought my book! Details of their offer can be found here.
- Inchoo – Upon hearing about two of their tutorials being linked up in the book have very kindly supplied me with my very own Inchoo “Life is too short for buying offline” T-Shirt! (in the post)
- Nexcess, MageStore, OneStepCheckout, FishPig, Daniel Waisberg and many others for checking out the book
Special Notes
As with all publications, once it’s done it’s done and there’s always going to be names and extensions that I have either forgotten to mention or that hadn’t been released at the time of publication.
I’d like to reserve this space for a few special notes on elements that should have made it into the book.
- MageSEO – this extension was sadly released only a few days after the book went to the printers. I wanted to add this here as this extension, worked on by Paul Rogers and the guys at GPMD has many great features and would have featured heavily in Chapter 8 of the book.
Independent Reviews
- A review by Traffic Motion can be found here.
- A review by Magenticians can be found here.
- A review by Open sourcing can be found here.
- Reviews on Amazon.com
Where to buy?
You can buy Magento SEO at either Packt (where you can find other retailers), Amazon UK or Amazon USA.