Stand with SEO plays a vital part in your marketing strategy since it significantly influences traffic and conversion rates. If it doesn't have a central role in your store it is a missed opportunity. So you should start looking for a way to improve that.
Though Magento complies with the best SEO practices and offers you a bunch of basic SEO features, it is best to use Magento 2 SEO extensions to get the most of it.
Today, we're going to cover the configuration of the Magento 2 SEO extension in particular.
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So to start with, navigate to Stores > Configuration > Magefan Extensions > SEO and enable the extension. Then go through all of the following settings.
Meta Tags Templates (Title, Descriptions, Keywords, H1 Title Tags)
Meta tags templates save you tons of time by applying meta titles, descriptions, keywords, and H1 tags automatically based on a mask.
All of those 4 sections are dedicated to the metadata mask that you set by applying product and category attributes. Though the options are the same for all of the meta elements, here you can also define whether to use the keywords in HEAD or the "People Also Searched For" section.
Permalink Settings (SEO-Friendly URLs)
Sometimes when you migrate products to Magento or synchronize your system with Magento some products and categories might be missing permalinks. However, not with our extension.
You can enable the Generate Products and Categories Permalinks options and cron will automatically generate permalinks for products and categories. However, you can also run the following command:
bin/magento magefan:seo:generate-permalinks
Canonical Tag
Using pagination, filtering, and search in Magento significantly facilitates your customers' browsing. However, it also can cause your some SEO trouble with duplicate content and wrong links being indexed.
For that, there are canonical tags. They help you define the main version of the page which should be pulled out in search.
Instead of applying canonical tags to each of your pages manually, your can add canonical tags in Magento 2 with our SEO extension. You simply need to enable them for corresponding pages.
Category Pagination
Except for the canonicals, there is a way to show the relationships between similar pages of Magento categories. It is the rel prev and rel next attributes you can add to your website pages for better indexing of pages in a series.
You just need to enable the corresponding option so those attributes appear within the <head> of the category paginated pages.
Besides you can choose whether to enable the display of category description and CMS blocks on all pagination pages. And finally, you can include or exclude page number in canonical tag or meta title.
Robots Meta Tags
How your pages appear in search results is not defined by metadata alone. Those studying SEO know that there are multiple things standing behind that, including robots meta tags.
While robots.txt defines whether search crawlers will even be able to access your pages, robots meta tags tell them how your pages should be crawled and indexed.
Magento covers the basics, but you have to take care of not less important tags yourself. So in this section, you have to set the max-snippet, max-image-preview, and max-video-preview which stand for:
- max-snippet — the minimum number of characters Google can pull out in the text snippet, where 0 defines to show no text snippets, -1 to set no limit for the number of characters.
- max-image-preview — the size of the image in the image snippet, standard, large or none.
- max-video-preview — the maximum number of seconds for a video snippet, where 0 means showing no video in snippets, -1 — places no limit on the length of the video.
So, directives for a page allowing to show 100 characters, a standard image, and 20 seconds of a video in snippets should look like this in <head> after you apply them.
<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:100" /> <meta name="robots" content="max-image-preview:standard" /> <meta name="robots" content="max-video-preview:20" />
You can learn more about it in the Google documentation on robots meta tags.
Auto Redirects
One of the merchants' biggest headaches is 404 catalog pages that appear because of products or categories being disabled. With large catalogs, it might be hard to get a hold of all of the disabled and enabled products and categories.
For that, you can enable an option to Redirect From Disabled Categories and Products. In both cases, customers will be redirected first to the parent category, then to the parent>parent category and homepage eventually.
Here you can also Redirect Products and Categories to Canonical URLs and Redirect to No-Slash URL which is useful in case you want to maintain shorter and more SEO-friendly URLs.
Product Breabcrumbs Fix
Website navigation is important not only from the customers' perspective but from search crawlers as well. Breadcrumbs, in particular, help robots to understand your website structure better.
So, in case you're missing the breadcrumbs on your category pages, enable this option to fix the issue and show them.
Cross Links
Internal linking is a way to boost page authority and spread the link juice through your website pages. However, adding them all manually will take ages. To optimize the process and manage cross linking in Magento 2 more effectively, use this option. Here you can select what cross-links will be available for.
Then to add cross-links navigate to Marketing > SEO&Search > Cross Link. You will find multiple options to enable cross-links on your Magento 2 store.
The best thing about this SEO extension is — it doesn't require you to be an SEO expert to manage vital SEO settings. Just a few SEO configurations are enough.
You can try it out on our live demo first, tweak the settings as you like, and only then move on to your own website.
However, don't forget to check out the Magento 2 SEO extension that offers you much more.