Structuring our categories for better optimization

Normally, our most competitive keywords will be classified as broad keywords, meaning that their relevance could be attributed to a variety of similar terms. This is why it makes sense to use top-level or parent categories as a basis for our broad phrases.

To use our example, Wooden Furniture would be an ideal top-level category to contain subcategories such as 'Wooden Tables', 'Wooden Chairs', and 'Wooden Wardrobes', with content on our top-level category page to highlight these subcategories. On the Magento administration panel, go to Catalog | Manage Categories. Here, we can arrange our category structure to match our keyword relevance and broadness.

In an ideal world, we would plan out our category structure before implementing it; sadly, that is not always the case. If we need to change our category structure to better match our SEO strategy, Magento provides a simple way to alter our category hierarchy.

For example, say we currently have a top-level category called Furniture, and within this category, we have Wooden Furniture, and we decide that we're only optimizing for Wooden Furniture; we can use Magento's drag-and-drop functionality to move Wooden Furniture to become a top-level category.

To do this, we would have to perform the following steps:

  1. Navigate to Catalog | Manage Categories.
  2. Drag our Wooden Furniture category to the same level as Furniture.
    Structuring our categories for better optimization

We will see that our URL has now changed from http://www.mydomain.com/furniture/wooden-furniture.html to http://www.mydomain.com/wooden-furniture.html.

We will also notice that our old URL now redirects to our new URL; this is due to Magento's inbuilt URL Rewrite System. When moving our categories within the hierarchy, Magento will remember the old URL path that was specified and automatically create a redirect to the new location.

This is fantastic for our SEO strategy as 301 redirects are vital for passing on authority from the old page to the new.

Note

A 301 redirect is one of the most useful tools in maintaining a search engine's understanding of our website pages. More information on their importance and how to set up 301 redirects is provided in Chapter 7, Technical Rewrites for Search Engines.

If we wanted to have a look at these rewrites ourselves, we could perform the following steps:

  1. Navigate to Catalog | URL Rewrite Management.
  2. From the table, we could find our old request path and see the new target path that has been assigned.

    Tip

    Not only does Magento keep track of our last URL, but any previous URLs also become rewritten. It is therefore not surprising that a large Magento store with numerous products and categories could have thousands upon thousands of rows within this table, especially when each URL is rewritten on a per-store basis.

There are many configuration options within Magento that allow us to decide how and what Magento rewrites for us automatically, and these will be covered within Chapter 7, Technical Rewrites for Search Engines.

Tip

Another important point to note is that your category URL key may change depending on whether an existing category with the same URL key at the same level had existed previously in the system. If this situation occurs, an automatic incremental integer is appended to the URL key, for example, wooden-furniture-2.html.

Magento Enterprise Edition has been enhanced to only allow unique URL keys. To know more, go to goo.gl/CKprNB.

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