Magento Meetup Mancheter with PushON: Paul Delaney Magento 2 and SEO

Editor's Notes

• #4: How to make Magento 2 work in search to achieve rankings for products. And we all know rankings mean revenue.
• #5: Setting page titles in Magento 2.0 comes in 2 stages. Individual pages can easily have their meta data updated by selecting the appropriate page for that store front. For example, to update the homepage meta description and title, you must edit those fields on the CMS page associated with the homepage.
• #6: But you also need to specify boilerplate brand title text. Title Suffix or Title Prefix allows you add the name of your store to every page. Do you need to add your brand name to your website title? Yes. Google will mostly add it to the displayed title in the Search Engine results page anyway so you should add a version of it yourself. This at least gives you control over how it’s displayed. 
• #7: An upgrade from 1.x to 2 is the way reviews, comparisons and wishlists are handled, a typical Magento site could create an extra 10,000 pages of thin content – for example, a separate review page for each product and a separate page for each individual review. Magento 2.0.x seems to deal with this in a much better way – reviews are part of the product page and add to wishlist / product compare are now AJAX based non-crawlable URLs.
• #8: There’s no proof that implementing product/offer schema improves rankings but its main benefit is that Google can use the information in a search snippet to improve CTR. This could be implemented in Magento 1.9.x via third party extensions such as Creare’s SEO plugin – or with a small amount of development – but it’s available out of the box in Magento 2.0.x using microdata, rather than JSON+LD. Product, Review, AggregateRating, and Offer Schema are implemented in Magento 2.0.x core. Magento’s more modular design means that developers should be able able to retain this functionality when extending the core for their own templates.
• #10: Modern ecommerce platforms can create a significant quantity of duplicate content – and without proper configuration, Magento 2.0 is no exception.
• #11: Adding canonical link for products and categories indicates to Google which of the multiple URLs that the categories and products can be accessed at is the correct URL. This can be resolved quite easily with some configuration settings. Actions;Canonical links enabled on both products and categories. Product URLs not using category path. And Product URL / Category URL suffix set as / (unless something like .html is preferred).
• #12: As well as SEO benefits a few other channels now have features
• #13: These are now integrated into Magento core! Product pages now pull in OpenGraph tags for Facebook and Pinterest. These specify the text that appears, the title and the image that gets pulled into Facebook when a URL from your site is shared. Twitter’s standard (“Twitter cards”) aren’t currently supported but this is currently unnecessary because Twitter falls back to OpenGraph tags when its own tags aren’t available. The implementation currently supports the og:type of product which allows pricing information to be pulled through too.
• #14: XML sitemaps allow Google to easily identify and crawl the URLs on your site and they are still a core feature in Magento 2.0. Enabling daily generation is best practice but this will vary – in practice this puts a small load on the server when there are thousands of products. One notable improvement is the ability to split your sitemap into multiple files – sites with over 50,000 products are typically recommended to do this. A second minor improvement is the ability to add the URLs for the sitemaps to the robots.txt file (Search Engine Submission Settings) – a small quality of life improvement and often neglected by site owners. Note: Any sitemaps generated should be immediately submitted to Google Search Console  to aid indexation of all your pages.
• #15: This blocks every URL on the site. This is useful on staging sites but should never be used on live sites – although it’s a reasonable way of dealing with duplicate “Trade” sites.