SEO catalog configuration

Magento has a special panel to take care of the catalog categories of SEO. To access this panel, navigate to Stores | Configuration | Catalog | Search Engine Optimization, as follows:

This panel has the following options:

• Popular Search Terms: This allows pages to display your most popular search phrases. Set this to Yes.
• Product URL Suffix: This is the suffix that is added to the end of your product URLs.
• Category URL Suffix: This is the suffix that is added to the end of your category URLs.
• Use Categories Path for Product URLs: This includes the category URL in your URL string.
• Create Permanent Redirect for URLs if URL Key Changed: This automatically creates a redirect via the URL Rewrites' module in Magento if the URL key is changed in any page on your website.
• Page Title Separator: This separates the page titles on the frontend of your store.
• Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Categories: This displays the main version of the category page. This is picked up by search engines to avoid duplicate content.
• Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Products: This has the same functionality as the previous item, but it works on the products layer.

  Note

  Source: http://slpxya.appspot.com/moz.com/ugc/setting-up-magento-for-the-search-engines.

With these options, you can choose the best strategy for SEO on catalog's default options. Magenta gives the administrator the opportunity to tune these options on catalog pages. We will work this out later in this chapter.

XML sitemap manager

Magento automatically generates an XML sitemap for your store and also keeps it up to date. In order to enable this, navigate to Stores | Configuration | Catalog | XML Sitemap. Magento has the following options for this section:

Basically, with these options, it is possible to choose the frequency and priority of updates. You may set additional options, such as Start Time and Error Notifications, only in the GENERAL settings tab. It's important to configure the cron job functionality in your web server to enable this feature.