Chapter 1. Preparing and Configuring Your Magento Website
One of the main reasons Magento is fast becoming the e-commerce platform of choice is the fact that, from the ground-up, it has been built with the foreknowledge and flexibility required to optimize every page, every product, and every snippet of code within its framework for search engines. That is assuming you know where to look and how to do it.
There are many similarities between Magento Community Edition and Magento Enterprise Edition, but also a few major differences. Wherever possible, I will try to highlight some of the features that may appear in one or the other of these platforms, and also reference in which version certain features were added or removed.
For the purpose of this guide, we will be using Magento Community Edition 1.8.0.0. As of the time of this writing, it is the latest stable release of the free edition. This should allow store owners, Magento developers, and SEO experts and novices alike access to all of the features contained within this book.
In this chapter, we will cover the following:
- Understanding the structure of a website, the purpose of optimizing for e-commerce, and the relationship between keywords and their position on a website
- Understanding the buying intent of our visitors and how this intent may differ depending on the type of page by which they enter our website
- The roles of content management system (CMS) pages and their uses in search engine optimization (SEO)
- The importance of the
content,title, andmetatags and Magento's default<head>data - How to change your category structure to benefit your SEO campaign
- How to set up an XML sitemap and Google Analytics E-commerce tracking