We are beginning a few series on Magento-specific best practices.  We think that it is a superior platform and easy to build out because the majority of it is already search friendly.  Today, we’ll be focusing on building brand pages.

This is one of Magento’s weaknesses in our opinion.  Brand pages using Magento brand extensions isn’t the best way to go.  That’s because it pulls a field and creates a page, which is fine until you want subcategories, collections or refinements.  If you have subcategories for a brand (and who doesn’t?), the page that results using brand extensions isn’t search friendly.

Our recommendation is to set up brand sections as categories.  Once you’ve done that, it’s easy to add subcategories, which will result in a search friendly page.

Our client, Charleston Naturally, does this with their brand page (shown below):

Also, you want to make sure that your Magento brand pages have good URLs.  You want them to make sense to the user and the search engine.

Here’s an example of a good URL: www.charlestonnaturally.com/brands/pevonia.

A bad example of a URL would be: www.charlestonnaturally.com/?p=1664. << What the heck is that? >>

To avoid confusion, we also recommend that you put product page URL just below the root.  Products can be under a few or many categories in an eCommerce store, so it’s important to keep organized.  You don’t need a product page for each category.