Magento SEO: Index your pages

When it comes to optimising your brand spanking new magento site you may want to think about things like googles webmaster tools and analytics.

Webmaster tools keeps track of the number of pages that have been indexed on your website (the number of pages that google has at its disposal to perform searches on) as well as keeping track of all crawl errors and managing your sitemaps.

If you have read my other post “Setting Up A Cron Job for Magento” you will know that magento has its own automated protocols for generating sitemaps and scheduling other important tasks.

It is always beneficial to generate your sitemap often to compensate for new pages on your website – google will then download and start crawling the extra pages on that sitemap.

However google indexes pages based on their priority. The priority of a page is defined in the XML sitemap and looks a little something like this:

<url>

<loc>http://www.mystore.co.uk/myproduct.html</loc>

<lastmod>2010-07-13</lastmod>

<changefreq>daily</changefreq>

<priority>0.8</priority>

</url>

This is all very familiar to anyone who knows XML and is all well and good in the grand scheme of things.

The problem with the magento generated sitemap is that the default priorities that are set for the different elements (Products, Categories, CMS pages) are not in the best order for the best SEO benefit.

What I expect to be the best method of SEO is to have the categories and CMS pages indexed first (remember priority = position in queue to be indexed). With the categories and CMS pages indexed first (many of which will be optimised pages) then traffic will start flooding to the site. Once this is done then the focus of the priority can shift back to the products. Try changing the priority in system>configuration>google sitemap of your different sections to the ones shown below (categories = 0.8, products = 0.8, CMS = 1.0) This way you should find that your pages with the keywords get indexed faster.

The reason why this is important is because imagine if you had 1000 products ready to go and 5 pages to optimise from. Google will perhaps index 5 of your pages a day – this means google will take 200 days to get round to your optimised CMS pages!

This is a general figure by the way – google does sometimes index outside of its priority but in the case of magento I believe this to be a major floor and one that I have seen delay a sites optimisation by several months.

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