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 the Magento 2 SEO extension to get the most out of it.
Today, you'll learn how to configure this 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.
SEO Rules
Are you tired of setting metadata for your products and categories manually, one at a time? If yes, then you're struggles are over. Magento 2 SEO rules help you set metadata for multiple products at once in a few clicks. Use product attributes to create templates for meta titles, descriptions, keywords, meat robots and H1 tags in a few clicks. Additionally, you can set custom canonical tags for your store pages.
The best part? It also works for specific pages. So if you have some custom pages or specific products and categories you want to configure SEO for, go for it. You can configure it in Marketing > SEO by Magefan > SEO Rules.
Meta Keywords
Although they don't seem significant, keywords you put into the Search Engine Optimization section play an important role in the page SEO. Usually, they are added to the <head> section and then taken into account by the search crawlers. However, you can remove them from there and instead display as the "People Also Searched For" block on the frontend.
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 the page number in a 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 no 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 sets 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 catalogue pages that appear because of disabled or deleted products or categories. With large catalogues, it might be hard to get a hold of all of the disabled and enabled products and categories.
For that, you can enable the Magento auto redirect with the Redirect From Disabled Categories and Products option. In both cases, customers will be redirected first to the parent category, then to the parent>parent category and homepage eventually. Same logic works for deleted product categories and CMS pages.
Here you can also Redirect Products/ Categories and Homepage to Canonical URLs and enable the Redirect to No-Slash URL option. The latter is useful in case you want to maintain shorter and more SEO-friendly URLs. And finally you can Remove index.php from the URLs if you like. No need to dive into code.
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.
Search Results Preview
Knowing how your page appears in search results before publishing it, it a great leverage. You get to know if the metadata isn't too long which is relevant to search engines. BY enabling the search preview you can set Recommended Lenths for H1 Tag, Meta Title and Description.
Note: the setting is already set to the recommended length, so you can just enable it.
Once you enable these options the Search Engine Optimization section in your page should look like this:
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 takes 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 by Magefan > Cross Links.
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.
