This article was written for Magento 1.x and is kept for reference. Running Magento 1 in 2026 is a security risk — ask me about migrating to Magento 2 / Adobe Commerce.
For a new Magento store these SEO steps come first:
1. Make the site visible to search engines. Set Default Robots to INDEX, FOLLOW in Configuration → Design → HTML Head.
2. Create robots.txt in the root folder, disallowing checkout, search, customer and system paths (e.g. /checkout/, /catalogsearch/, /customer/, /app/, /var/).
3. Optimize page titles for category and content pages with relevant search terms.
4. Set default meta tags — Default Title and Default Description in Configuration → Design → HTML Head.
5. Generate a Google XML sitemap via System → Configuration → Google Sitemap.
6. Add canonical links to avoid duplicate-content issues (built into Magento 2: Configuration → Catalog → SEO).