Tutorials for Magento and Joomla! - Yireo

MageBridge SEO Guide

MageBridge offers a clean way to integrate Magento in Joomla! without reinventing the wheel. By copying the Magento theme output into the component area and module areas of Joomla!, in most cases the output is still 100% W3C-compliant. If it's not, you need to solve this by modifying the theme - either the Joomla! template or the Magento theme. This guide sums up most of the common practices to optimize your MageBridge-site.

W3C compliance

MageBridge tries to take care of many things as possible, without you worrying about it. Metadata like keywords and the page description are fetched through the bridge and added as Joomla! headers to the page, while MageBridge also takes care of duplicate headers. However one (big) thing MageBridge does not take care of is theming. In many cases integrating the Magento theme inside the Joomla! template will not cause huge problems, but it could happen that your specific theme-combo contains problems like duplicate classes and duplicate IDs.

Duplicate classes are not bad, they probably only mess up your design. But the problem of duplicate IDs needs to be resolved, because such HTML will never be W3C-compliant. Our theming guides give you more hints on how to solve these problems. The first basic step towards a Search Engine Optimized site is to make every single page W3C-compliant.

It's all about text

The main reason to choose for MageBridge is probably to be able to add more CMS-options to your Magento webshop. You're using your Magento webshop to sell products, and now you can use Joomla!-based content to attract even more visitors. Make sure you reference your Magento products on every Joomla! page, either by using content tagging or through modules.

Preventing duplicate content

Duplicate content is regarded by many bad for search engine optimization. Though it could be argued whether this is needed or not, you might be tempted to make the Magento webshop only accessible through Joomla! and not any more by accessing the Magento application directly. While MageBridge translates every single Magento-link to a MageBridge link, visitors can still visit the Magento application if they would know the direct URL. Because MageBridge serves the same content as Magento does, this is duplicate content. And if visitors can access Magento directly, there is a (very small) chance search engines will find out about this as well.

The best strategy would be to redirect every visitor from Magento to Joomla!. But if somebody visits a specific URL in Magento, it would be unfriendly to redirect that user to the default Joomla! homepage - you want to redirect the user directly to the same page within Joomla!. Lucky enough, converting the Magento URL into a Joomla! URL is easy. MageBridge uses the Magento URL-system, so a rewrite of the old Magento page to the new Joomla! page is very easy.

https://MAGENTO/nine-west-women-s-lucero-pump.html
https://JOOMLA/shop/nine-west-women-s-lucero-pump.html

See the tutorial Prevent direct access to Magento for a complete htaccess-example.

Performance

Websites are also indexed by their performance. If a website has a really low performance, visitors will not like it, so search engines neither. Tuning the performance is something primarily for Joomla! and Magento individually. However, there are some extra remarks to be made for MageBridge - please see the MageBridge Performance Tuning tutorial for more information.

Joomla! SEF extensions

Joomla! 1.0 did badly when optimizing URLs for search engines, so with Joomla! 1.0 you needed extra extensions to really optimize your site. Extensions like sh404sef, SEF Advance and OpenSEF were very popular. However, when Joomla! 1.5 was released, one of the major improvements involved a complete rewrite of the SEF-system and extra extensions became less needed.

Currently, the SEF-capabilities of the Joomla! core should be sufficient for most sites. We have optimized the MageBridge-extension to combine this Joomla! URL-system with the URL-system of Magento. This means that you optimize URLs by configuring either the alias (Joomla!) or the URL-key (Magento), without the need to worry about the actual URL-creation.

MageBridge is only compatible with the default Joomla! router-functionality. Any third party SEF extension that allows backward-compatibility with the Joomla! core SEF, is compatible with MageBridge. Any third party SEF extension does not offer backward-compatiblity is not compatible with MageBridge.

• List of SEF extensions with MageBridge support
• Known issues for MageBridge