Magento SEO Checklist: How to Get On Page One

Every website needs proper SEO, and it’s even more so for eCommerce stores, as failing to adopt SEO practices into your webstore means that you’re voluntarily restricting your visibility on search engines. This can lead to potentially thousands, if not millions of revenue loss per year for your business.
To ensure proper SEO for your Magento store, some work will be required. And with our years of experience in providing SEO service for Magento websites, we have compiled for you a checklist of SEO practices to go by.
Our SEO checklist consists of three main SEO practices—on-page SEO, technical SEO, and off-page SEO. Let’s dive in:

On-page SEO

On-page SEO (also known as on-site SEO) is a practice that involves optimizing for ranking signals that happen on your pages. When people refer to on-page (or on-site) SEO, what they really refer to is page-specific practices to boost rankings in search engines, such as creating optimized meta title and meta description, or adding structured data to pages that need it.

Make sure URL keys are SEO-friendly

SEO-friendly URLs are ones that are as simple as possible, and this means unreadable parameters in the URL such as index.php?id_sezione=360&sid=3a5ebc944f41daa6f849f730f1 are best removed. In Magento, you can make sure your URLs are SEO-friendly by regularly checking for URL keys.

URL key is the part of the static URL that describes the product or category

By default, Magento automatically generates URL keys based on your product/category/CMS page’s name so this shouldn’t be anything you need to worry about, but it doesn’t hurt to check. As a best practice, your URL keys should be simple, in lower-case, separated by hyphens, and contain your product/category name.

For products

To check for the URL key of a product, in Magento Admin, navigate to Catalog > Products, and choose a product that you’d like to check for the URL key.

In product configuration, expand the Search Engine Optimization section and notice the URL Key field.

You’ll want to make sure that your URL key fits into the description of a SEO-friendly URL key—it should be simple, in lower-case, separated by hyphens, and contain your product name.

For categories

It’s the same story for categories. In your Magento Admin, navigate to Catalog > Categories and choose a category that you’d like to check for SEO-friendly URL:

In the configuration panel that follows, expand the Search Engine Optimization section and check for URL key. Similarly, URL keys for your categories need also be simple, in lower-case, separated by hyphens, and contain your category name.

For CMS pages

To check for the URL keys of your CMS pages, go to Content > Elements > Pages. Here you can see your existing CMS pages, along with an overview of your URL keys.

Double click on the listed URL Key and you’ll be able to change it directly.

Create optimized meta title & meta description

Products with good meta data (e.g., meta titles and meta descriptions) stand out in search results. To craft effective meta titles and meta descriptions for your products, you’ll need to make sure that they’re within character limit, and that they provide relevant information to the customers.

Example of good meta title and meta description

For all your products

Because manually filling out meta title and meta description for each of your product pages would require a lot of work, Magento does provide an option to automatically generate them based on your configuration. You can configure this option by going into: Stores > Configuration > Catalog -> Catalog > Product Fields Auto-Generation.

From here you can change the format of the metadata for your products accordingly, using supported placeholders such as:

• {{color}}
• {{country_of_manufacture}}
• {{description}}
• {{gender}}
• {{material}}
• {{name}}
• {{short_description}}
• {{size}}
• {{sku}}

For example, let’s say you want to add the country of manufacture to your meta title in order to boost visibility, your new Mask for Meta TItle should be:

• Best Selling {{name}} from {{country_of_manufacture}}

For individual products

There will be cases when you need to configure the meta title and meta description for individual products, as changing the auto-generation settings will mess up the metadata for your entire store.

To do this, you’ll want to navigate to Catalog > Products, and choose a product that you want to change meta title & meta description. In the configuration panel that follows, expand the Search Engine Optimization section and change Meta Title & Meta Description.

Enable canonical meta tag

Duplicated content is unavoidable, but that doesn’t mean that you won’t suffer a penalty if crawlers find too much of it on your website. To get around this, you’ll need to enable canonical URLs, as they help hint to crawlers the master copy of a page.

What constitutes duplicated content?

Crawlers see your website in terms of URLs, and this means pages that have different URLs but with the same content (such as a product page that exists in multiple categories) will be recognized as duplicated and potentially lead to penalties.

For example, the following are two URLs of the same product:

• http://example.com/category/sub-category/product-01.html
• http://example.com/category/product-01.html

In Magento, you can enable canonical URLs for your product pages, category pages, and your CMS pages (the latter requires a little bit more technical knowledge).

Enable canonical URLs for categories and products

In your Magento 2 backend, go to Stores > Settings > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog. Expand the Search Engine Optimization section and enable the following settings by setting them to Yes.

• Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Categories
• Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Products

Enable canonical URLs for CMS pages

Enabling canonical URLs for CMS pages is a little bit trickier for newer Magento versions. If you have access to your Magento root folder, we suggest following our comprehensive guide on how you can implement canonical URLs into specific CMS pages.

Add structured data

Even though structured data itself is not a direct ranking signal, its impact on your click-through-rate on Google Search results can be significant.

With the right structured data set up, you can make your page more appealing on search results and as a result, drive more visitors into your site.

In Magento 2, the best way to add structured data into your pages is to use an SEO extension. Good SEO extensions take care of the job for you and generate structured data automatically.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO covers a broad range of optimization techniques. It can involve from creating a robots.txt file, a sitemap, to enabling HTTPS and optimizing the performance of your website.

Remove store codes from URLs

With store code enabled, customers will see different URLs when viewing your website on different store views. For example, below are two websites with different store views, one is in English, and the other French.

Default English store view:

http://example.com/magento/en/

French store view:

http://example.com/magento/fr/

While the store codes at the end of the URL (e.g., /en/, /fr/) could be useful for management purposes, users (and search engines) might see little benefit from it. To remove store codes from your URL, in your Magento 2 Admin, go to Stores > Configuration > General > Web > URL Options, and set Add Store Code to URLs to No

Enable web server rewrite

Enabling web server rewrite will get rid of the index.php found in your store URL. For example,

URL without Web Server Rewrite

http://example.com/magento/index.php/storeview/url-identifier

URL with Web Server Rewrite

http://example.com/magento/storeview/url-identifier

To enable web server rewrite,

• Log into your Magento Admin and go to: Stores > Configuration > General > Web.
• Expand Search Engine Optimization, uncheck Use system value, and set Use Web Server Rewrites to Yes

Create a robots.txt

A robots.txt file instructs search engine crawlers on how to crawl your website. When properly set up, a robots.txt file can reduce the time and the resources needed for the crawling process of your website by restricting crawlers access to a certain pages and directories. Without a robots.txt file, crawlers coming across your website will crawl everything that they can, and this might be wasteful if your site has lots of pages that don’t need to be indexed, or if your site belongs to one of those very large sites (1 million+ unique pages) that need to pay attention to crawl budget. 

Similar to generating a sitemap, you can also generate a robots.txt file for your Magento store with just a few configurations done on your Magento backend. To configure your robots.txt file, in your Magento 2 backend, go to Content > Design > Configuration and edit the Global configuration in the first row.

Expand Search Engine Robots and edit custom instructions for your robots.txt file.

To learn about what custom instructions to fill in, do refer to our advanced guide which details everything you need to know about configuring robots.txt in Magento 2.

Generate & submit a sitemap

A sitemap, as its name suggests, contains the map/structure of your website and helps make your website easier to understand to crawlers. In Magento, you can generate a sitemap pretty easily with just a few configurations in your Magento backend. 

To enable sitemap generation for your store, set Enabled to Yes in Stores > Settings > Configuration > Catalog > XML Sitemap > Generation Settings. Also in this XML Sitemap setting, you can configure more options such as sitemap file limits, frequency and priority.

Next, go to Marketing > SEO & Search > Site Map and click on the Add Sitemap button.

In the configuration panel that follows, enter:

• Filename: enter sitemap.xml
• Path: enter /

Choose Save & Generate. Wait for a while and you should be able to see your new sitemap generated.

A generated sitemap in Magento Admin

Now all that’s left for you to do is to make your sitemap available to Google by submitting it in Google Search Console.

Create redirections

If you’ve just recently had some changes in your site’s URLs, make sure that you don’t lose any link juice by setting up redirects in your Magento store. Redirections can be set up in your Magento 2 backend relatively simple by using the URL rewrite feature.

To use URL rewrite, go to your Magento 2 backend and navigate to: Marketing > SEO & Search > URL Rewrites and click on Add URL Rewrite.

For more detailed steps, do check out our guide on how to create URL redirects in Magento.

Convert to HTTPS

With HTTPS Everywhere being a thing since 2014, Google did make it pretty clear that security is a top priority for them. In fact, they even went so far as to officially recognize HTTPS as a ranking signal, which is why it’s vital that your store should be served over HTTPs. 

To convert your Magento website to HTTPS, first you’ll need an SSL certificate. SSL certificates are issued by CA (Central Authority), and usually there’s a fee associated with it. However, there’s a high chance that your hosting provider could generate and install an SSL certificate for your website so don’t hesitate to consult them first.

Once you’ve obtained your SSL certificate, you’ll need to enable it in your Magento backend. Go to your Magento Admin and navigate to Stores > Configuration > General > Web. Expand Base URLs (Secure):

And set Use Secure URLs on Store and Use Secure URLs in Admin from No (default value) to Yes, and make sure that your secure URLs all start with https.

Ensure optimal page performance

Going as far back as 2010, site speed has been a major ranking signal in Google Search. Since then, speed has always been a major concern for store owners. Up until recently, the bar has been taken up a notch with the introduction of the page experience update, as this update requires pages to deliver optimal page experiences (defined by the Core Web Vitals metrics) to mobile users.

Your Magento store should follow the same guidelines—having speed at the top of your priority list. There’s no easy way to have your website run blazing fast overnight, but the following techniques should be able to make the experience a bit faster for your customers:

• Enable full-page caching
• Disable flat catalogs

For a full list of optimization techniques to follow, do refer to our speed optimization guide for Magento 2.

Off-page SEO

Contrary to on-page SEO, off-page SEO is a practice that involves optimizing for ranking signals that happen off your pages/website. It’s important that you should know off-page SEO techniques in order to boost your store’s rankings, even though the techniques themselves are not strictly related to Magento.

Have social media presence

While your social media presence does not directly affect your store’s ranking, it still affects your domain’s authority and is correlated with (not responsible for) the ranking of your website.

The correlation between social signals and ranking position is extremely high, and the number of social signals per landing page has remained constant when compared with the values from last year’s whitepaper.

Searchmetrics’ 2016 Rebooting Ranking Factors White Paper

Successful stores know how to direct traffic from social media to their websites. To reach that #1 position on search results, your content needs to be engaging, informative, relevant, and the best performing ones are the ones that gather a high attraction of social shares.

Create a link building plan

Having your products referenced by high-authority websites helps boost your authority, trust, and relevancy. And when a lot of websites link to a product page of yours, search engines will recognize that that specific product might be important and worth placing higher up on the search results. To develop a proper link building strategy, you should know that most of the time, it’d be a two-way relationship—you scratch my back and I scratch yours, and you’ll have to place a do-follow backlink from their site on your website.

Measure your results

Last and not least, your store must have a form of tracking your SEO effort, as well as how well your store is doing. If you’re just getting started, we recommend going with Google Analytics to track your day-to-day operations, and Google Search Console to measure your SEO efforts—as in measuring which search queries do users use to find your website, performance of keywords by click-through rates, impressions, position, and many more.

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Understanding PCI Compliance in Magento

What is PCI Compliance?

PCI stands for Payment Card Industry. PCI Compliance is adherence to a set of security standards related to the protection of card data during a period when a financial transaction occurs and after it has been finished.

As eCommerce is growing, so does people’s concern about data breach. Lost or stolen personal information may be used by ill-intended people to possess other’s bank accounts, or to serve other purposes. Also, when it happens, it is usually not data of only one or two customers, the numbers of stolen accounts can be thousands and even more. 

In 2019, the Buca di Beppo restaurant chain was under a cyber-attack, which led to the loss of over 2 million credit card users’ information. It raised great concern for their customers, and also damaged the reputation of the businesses that had provided the card payment options in question.

A business that lost their customer’s data will not only pay for hefty fines, but they will also lose their customers. And this is so much damaging to a business that what a fine can do!

So if you as an online merchant using Magento want to achieve PCI compliance, here’s what you need to know.

There are four different tiers of PCI Compliance, connected with an annual review by a Qualified Security Assessor, and a quarterly scan by an Approved Scanning Vendor of different scope.

The tiers are determined by the number of payments a merchant proceeds in a year. 

PCI Compliance Chart (image in courtesy of BigCommerce)

For each tier, they’ll need to follow specific requirements.

Compliance tiers	Criteria	Requirements
Tier 1	You have more than 6 million transactions per year	– Report on compliance – Scan for vulnerability regularly – Attestation of compliance
Tier 2	Your stored transactions per year fall between 1 and 6 million	– Self-assessment questionnaire  – Regular vulnerability scan – Attestation of compliance
Tier 3	In case you have from 20,000 to 1 million eCommerce transactions during the year	– Self-assessment questionnaire  – Regular vulnerability scan – Attestation of compliance
Tier 4	If you have less than 20,000 eCommerce transactions a year; or 1 million total transactions of any types	– Self-assessment questionnaire  – Vulnerability scan – Attestation of compliance

Requirements for each tier

By complying with PCI DSS standards, your business can play its part in preventing credit card fraud and earn more trust from customers. All customer credit card information must be protected by PCI – their full or partial account number, card expiration date, CVV (security code), and even their name.

Here are the requirements for the PCI Compliance

• You have to maintain a firewall in order to protect the card holder data
• Do not use default system user and password or other security parameters
• Protect the stored card holder data
• Data transmissions should be encrypted
• Use up-to-date antivirus software
• Maintain and regularly check on the systems and applications security
• Restricted access to card holder data
• Assign unique ID for each person with computer access
• Monitor regularly the access to your network resources
• Test regularly the security systems and processes
• Policy for information security

MAGENTO PCI COMPLIANCE

Magento Commerce Edition

Taking a great life from its ancestor, Magento 2 Commerce (Cloud) Edition is PCI certified as a Level 1 Solution Provider. It’s now easier for businesses to be PCI-compliant. They can use Magento’s PCI Attestation of Compliance to support them in proving they are meeting the specific requirements. 

As the majority of those using Commerce Edition are mid-sized and large brands, who may proceed with more than 6 million transactions per year, this is extremely important to them.

Besides, Magento stores are integrated with payment gateways, which direct information directly to the payment gateway and not store them in the Magento server. This is a feature included in both Magento Open Source and Commerce editions.

Magento Open Source Edition

PCI-compliant isn’t a feature included in the Open Source Edition. But there are several ways that you can still make your Magento website PCI compliant:

1. Use a third-party payment method (for example, PayPal express)

This is the method we mentioned in the part for the Commerce edition.

If you choose this option you won’t have to be PCI-compliant yourself, because you don’t have to store credit card information on your server. In the past, using a third-party payment gateway may interrupt your customer’s checkout process. But this isn’t the problem anymore.

Merchants can now offer a seamless checkout experience with a third-party payment gateway. By keeping sensitive data from being stored in the Magento server, you can make changes to the core Magento eCommerce application and not have to go through re-assessment to be PCI-compliant. 

2. Use a SaaS PCI compliant payment application

You can use for example the CRE Secure which is PCI compliant. The customer is taken to another website (URL changes), but the form may be customized to look consistent with your store.

For a better understanding of PCI Compliance, take a look at the infographic below:

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Manage Invite Codes for Your Laravel Applications

 Laravel Invite Codes is a package by Mateus Junges that allows you to manage invite codes for your Laravel application easily. It works by configuring a middleware that validates an invite code before accessing a route:

1Route::get('/protected-route', function() {
2    //
3})->middleware('protected_by_invite_codes');

You can generate an invite code using the following API, restricting this code to a specific user account:

1use \Junges\InviteCodes\Facades\InviteCodes;
2 
3$invite_code = InviteCodes::create()
4    ->expiresAt('2020-02-01')
5    ->maxUsages(10)
6    ->restrictUsageTo('contato@mateusjunges.com')
7    ->save();

You can learn more about this package, get full installation instructions, and view the source code on GitHub at mateusjunges/laravel-invite-codes.

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Server Timing Metrics for your Laravel Apps

 Laravel Server Timing is a package by Marcel Pociot that allows you to easily add server timing information within your Laravel apps.

Server timing information helps instrument request/response data from the server for at-a-glance data you want surface in the browser.

After you install the Server Timing package, it provides the following metrics out-of-the-box:

• Bootstrap
• Application time
• Total

And here’s an example of the server timing information as seen in Google Chrome using the default instrumented values:

You can add additional measurements with this package using the ServerTiming facade or accompanying service in your code:

 1ServerTiming::start('Running expensive task');
 2 
 3// do something
 4 
 5ServerTiming::stop('Running expensive task');
 6 
 7// If you already know the exact time:
 8ServerTiming::setDuration('Running expensive task', 1200);
 9 
10// Measure the duration of the closure:
11ServerTiming::setDuration('Running expensive task', function() {
12    sleep(5);
13});

Finally, here’s an example of the raw header value using the default measurements:

1Server-Timing: bootstrap;desc="Bootstrap";dur=32.552003860474, app;desc="App";dur=8, total;desc="Total";dur=41.576147079468,

You can learn more about this package, get full installation instructions, and view the source code on GitHub at beyondcode/laravel-server-timing.

The Server-Timing header documentation on MDN provides further details on the spec.

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