 Magento SEO Secrets, a guide to optimizing a Magento website part one of two. Well, when it comes to high-end websites, Magento is it. I know our survival okay food company is built on Magento. Magento is an extremely robust platform and if you have it on a Magento website, you're going to want to watch this video all the way through because it's going to make you some money and it's going to show you how to do things that I bet you didn't know. As a matter of fact, American Express, Ford, Puma, Xerox and many more huge companies use Magento as their primary website. As a matter of fact, at last check 2019, 30% of all e-commerce ran through Magento websites. Hey, let me put a graphic up on the screen. This will blow you away. The top 1 million websites, 1% are Magento. Top 100,000, 1.31% are Magento and top 10,000, look at that. 1.77%. That's pretty amazing. Now, if you've got a Magento website, good for you because it's a great platform and there's a lot of things that just out of the box work really well but there's a lot of things that you can do for SEO also. Now, you're going to want to watch this video and the next video to get all the things that you can do and one thing you could do right now I didn't even think about this. You could subscribe. Yeah, you could hit that subscribe button down there. It's red. If you haven't subscribed, click it, turn it gray and don't forget, ring the bell, turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live. That's really important stuff. Alright, let's get back to this Magento SEO stuff. So what is Magento SEO? Now, Magento has a lot of extra things and they're like robot files and site map files and the list goes on and on and on but I want to kind of drill down and show you some of the things that you should be working on. Okay, I want to talk about crawling and navigating and the duplicate content that that can cause. Now, if we look at the image on the screen right here you'll see all the different options in here on this particular website and one of the biggest SEO issues with any Magento site is likely going to be the faceted navigation. Faceted navigations create huge crawling and indexing issues since their existence exponentially increases the number of pages that can be crawled. As pages in the faceted navigation will only either sort or narrow existing products these pages create duplicate and similar content. Also, if you think about the fact that every single combination of parameters could be considered a unique page the number of pages a faceted navigation creates can be enormous. Google shows a video from Google they indicate how a store with 158 skews actually created 380,000 unique URLs that Google bought could crawl not ideal. Okay, so let's take a look at some of the steps that you can actually do to fix some of these things. Now, number one you could audit to find low quality index pages from the faceted navigation. Identify steps to remove them from the index no index conological tag. Review the site's log files to find any low quality pages that are getting crawled. Block the crawl of any low value parameters through the robot's text. Consider only allowing pages with high search potential to be indexed. Now, of course the steps taken here are going to vary a lot depending on the site. The overall point is that if you utilize a faceted navigation on your Magento site one of the most important things you'll need to do is review how Google is crawling and indexing the pages that are being generated and take steps to remove them. Now, by default Magento canonical tags will not be set for both products and categories. Now fortunately you can fix this. Let me put it up on the screen and show you what to do. You want to navigate to stores configuration and then you want to in the catalog dropdown select catalog. Select the search engine optimization dropdown. Ensure that use canonical link meta tag for categories and use canonical link meta tag for products are set to yes and then select save configuration. By doing this adjustment you can be assured that all the pages and categories have their own individual tags generated. Now, let me put another example up on the screen so you can actually see what I'm talking about. When you're looking at paginated URLs of Magento sites we can see that by default proper canonical tags are not set. In Magento all of the paginated URLs in a given series have canonical tag that points back to the root category page. For example, here is how the canonical tag of page two of a particular category would look as you can see it on the screen here. Technically this is not the best practice from an SEO standpoint. Canonical tags should be used to consolidate duplicate content. Now since paginated content is not technically duplicate content they need to refer back to their own page. This will tell Google that each page has unique content and it is different. Now here's a crazy example actually. If you look for example here's a here's a Magento site where over 4,000 internal search pages have gotten caught in Google's index. If you see this here this is insane. In order to ensure that these pages don't get indexed by Google you'll want to be sure the no index tag is applied to them. We recommend having a developer implement this for you and you can do more research on up work or five or something like that to find somebody who can actually do this work for you. I understand this may not be something you'll want to do but you're going to have to manage it. You're going to have to tell people what you want done or else you won't know about it and you can't get it fixed. Now let's talk about the robots.txt okay and I'm going to put an image up on the screen. Within Magento you can also configure the robots.txt file. You'll want to utilize the robots.txt file in order to limit how many pages of your Magento site that Google is eligible to crawl. This is especially important to configure if your site utilizes a faceted navigation that allows users to select from a variety of attributes. Fortunately Magento does allow you to control the robots.txt on your site. To do this you can perform the following steps. Number one in the admin sidebar navigate to content design configuration find the store view you want to adjust and select edit. Expand the search engine robots drop down add the robots.txt commands in the edit custom instruction of the robots.txt file field. Now of course every site is different. There is no copy and paste type of format for this. It's really going to be largely dependent on your site but I would like to show you the steps real quick. I'll put them up on the screen. You'll want to think about the low value pages created by the faceted navigation and sorting options. You'll also want to consider the site's internal search pages, login pages and the user's shopping cart. Next thing we want to talk about is sitemap.xml. If this allows Google to actually crawl your site and figure out where everything is. Okay it's kind of technical stuff but it allows Google to do these things. Now fortunately Magento has the ability to create a sitemap for you so you can provide this information to Google. Let me show you the steps real quick. You want to navigate to marketing, SEO and search, sitemap. Then click add sitemap button. For file name add the text sitemap.xml. For path choose the URL path you want to be associated with your sitemap.xml file. This is generally at the let's say pub URL path and then click save and generate. It's that simple. Now this will correctly set up your sitemap for Magento and then all you have to do is submit it to Google. Next thing you want to think about is JavaScript rendering. Now while this isn't necessarily a bad thing, you'll want to stay on top of it and make the necessary adjustments. For instance, here's an example of a product page in Magento where JavaScript is enabled in the browser. We can see thumbnail images, text and tabs and a related product section at the bottom there. So it's very helpful. However, most of that content is reliant on JavaScript to load. When turning JavaScript off using the web developer extension for Chrome, most of those elements do not render. Notice how we can only see the initial three tabs on this page here. See how that is? A lot of it's missing. Since JavaScript is required to load a lot of the content on the page, we'll want to ensure that it's getting indexed properly. Fortunately, we can use tools such as the mobile friendly testing tool or the rich results test to determine what Google bot is able to render on that page. Then I want to talk about URL paths out of the box. What Magento does is they actually add an extension of HTML on the end of that URL. Now while that isn't necessarily bad for SEO, it can be more difficult for the person looking at that URL. So we want to make some changes. Let me show you the steps real quick. You want to navigate to stores configuration in the catalog dropdown, select catalog, select the search engine optimization dropdown, find product URL suffix and category URL suffix, replace the HTML with a slash just like that, and then select save configuration. The result will be cleaner and easier to read URLs for your store. Now this recommendation I do in a warning is for brand new stores. If your if your website's been around a while and it's already indexed and you've got SEO off it, this could actually lower your rankings if you do this. So if you have an established site, don't do this part. So I know that's a lot. I know that's a lot of stuff to do. But once you get in there and you start doing it and you make in these adjustments or if you're concerned, hire somebody that knows how to make these adjustments, you'll understand it better and you'll you'll get it. Okay, these are just all new terms and new words for you probably. So one thing I did do is I split this video into two because it's a lot of information. So you must watch both of these videos. Part two, there will be a link in the description. All you have to just click there, you can go to part two, and that's where I'm going to suggest you go right now. But before you do that, before you go anywhere, hang on, don't forget to subscribe. If that subscribe button turn it from red to gray, don't forget to ring the bell, turn all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live. I really appreciate you watching this video as a token of my appreciation. I have a $97 course, but I want to give it to you absolutely free. It is listed in the description below along with a lot of other links, a lot of helpful information, links to other videos that may also help you too. Thank you so much for watching this video. Please put your comments below, give me a thumbs up. Comments can be anything. They could be questions, they could be bragging about what you've done. They could be just saying hello to me, but put some comment below. I love the interaction and I answer and read all of them. Thanks so much for watching guys. I'll see you in the next video.