One of the advantages of using Magento is that it is designed to be search engine friendly, that is, it meets the SEO requirements and so your store gets better placements in search results.

Some of these techniques are based on building the html code, invisible in the eyes of your site visitor, but important for building pages. They use the tags: title, description, and keywords.

This post is NOT an SEO class, so I’m not going to go into the details of how important these tags are and how they positively affect your site promotion. To learn more about SEO I suggest reading Martha Gabriel’s book – SEM and SEO: Search Marketing.

Let’s see how Magento allows you to create this information individually, thus generating more value and relevance for each page of your site.

Global Settings

You can create a generic configuration on the system, which will reflect on every page of your site. View in:

System > Configuration > Visual [HTML Header]

We will see the fields here:

Default Title – This title will be shown in the browser whenever there is no title on your navigation pages. We can say that it is a “reserve” title.

Default Description – Works the same as the title, if your pages do not have their own description, this description will be used. This description does not even visually interfere with your pages, but can be used by search engines when it comes to displaying your site as a result.

Default Keywords – Follows the same logic as the fields above if they are not entered in the navigation pages, then the words saved in this field will be printed in the code.

There was a time when this field was very important, but a lot of people started to abuse its use, and nowadays it has almost no relevance at all. But I believe we should pay attention to any possibility of improvement and optimization on the site, so do not ignore this field.

We could also make use of the Title Prefix and Title Suffix, to display before and after each Title a standard word/phrase. For example:

MarioSAM - ...dynamic title per page... - en.mariosam.eu

In this tab [HTML Header] you can make other settings that we will not cover in this post.

CMS Pages

Each page you create in the Magento CMS can (and should) have its custom values for title, description, and keywords.

When you access a page from your CMS, you can immediately see the first field of “Page Information” or “Page Title“- which corresponds to the title that will be displayed at the top of the browser (title).

The other fields are in the “Page Tags Meta” menu. Where you tell the description of the page and the keywords.

Category also

Categories are also important pages in this process, so they can be customized in the same way. Go to:

Catalog > Manage Category

When creating (or editing) a category, do not confuse the Name and Description fields with the available fields below: Page Title, Page Description, and Keywords.

These are the last three that represent title, description, and keywords for your category.

Each product a sentence

The same category care should be taken when customizing the product tags. Because the names of some fields may be confusing at the time of registration.

The “Name” and “Description” fields populated in the [General] tab are used when presenting the product in frontend.

And the “Page Title“, “Page Description“, and “Keywords” fields of the [Meta Information] tab are used in the title, description, and keywords tags of your html header.

However, if the fields in Meta Information are not filled, the system will use the “Name“, “Description“, and “Category” fields to populate the meta tags dynamically, making a relationship as:

title > Name - Category
description > Description
keywords > Name

So in the absence of this information Magento tries to improvise to keep his page relevant and informative. But of course a well-done intervention in the fields of Meta Information only brings even better results in the construction of your pages.

Success!