Go deeper into SEO for Prestashop 1.7

You may have been wondering how to improve SEO for PrestaShop 1.7 . You may have wondered what aspects to focus on and where to start. Shall we begin? All you need to do is dig into these questions. Let's get started!

Key Elements of On-Page SEO in Prestashop

Meta title

This is the most important element to tell search engines which keyword you want to optimize a specific URL for and, therefore, to optimize SEO in Prestashop. How to fill in meta title tags in Prestashop?

• Place the keyword as far to the left as possible.
• Keep the length between 50 and 55 characters.
• Titles must be unique: this means that there are not several products or categories for which you have used the same title.
• Avoid having the title be the same as the H1.

Meta title and other tags on Prestashop pages:

Meta description

Although it does not directly influence SEO positioning, a well-written and constructed description will generate more clicks . How can you achieve this?

• Again, place the keyword as far to the left as possible. It's worth giving it that much importance, although it already stands out just by putting it in bold.
• There is also a recommended maximum length: try not to exceed 110-115 characters.
• Use original and unique descriptions for products and categories. Copying and pasting is not well received by search engines.

Meta description and meta title for products in Prestashop: Meta description and meta title for categories:

What happened to meta keywords?

If you remember, in the PrestaShop 1.6 interface there was a field that has disappeared in version 1.7. It was the keyword meta information . It is logical that it has been removed, since it has long since ceased to have meaning and relevance for search engines. Maintaining a list of these keywords seems like a vestige of another era that contributed practically nothing.

Heading hierarchy: H1, H2, H3

H1, H2 and H3 are known as header tags . They are part of the HTML code of a website and their function is to indicate to browsers the structure of the content and what the fundamental parts of that structure are. They are very relevant, since they are used to use keywords and for Google to understand that we want to use them for positioning. The difference between these headings is in the importance each of them has. The H1 is the highest hierarchy heading, it is the title of the content . It is essential for using keywords, defining the content of the page and making it clear to browsers what it is about, since everyone knows that what appears in the H1 is the most important content. The H2 is the most important after the H1. It works as a subtitle, so it is placed as the beginning of a subsection or particular segment within the content. Ideally, it is used to attack secondary keywords, although it can also be used as a reinforcement of the main keyword or even as a related question. Thus, it should basically be a way to separate the content in a friendly way, helping users to locate themselves within our page. H3s are subsections within H2s, so they are used to segment or organize the content provided by an H2. Basically, they are included with the aim of opening more sections with specific topics within the H2s.

How to make a URL friendly?

Ideally, your URL should not be too long and should contain the keyword , but not too much. What is a SEO friendly URL?

• Contains the keyword to be positioned.
• Contains no parameters, IDs, etc. (or only the necessary ones).
• Separate concepts with hyphens.
• Avoid so-called stop words such as prepositions or articles.
• It does not contain “strange” characters such as accents, eñes, cedillas.
• It is always made up of lowercase letters.

But there is also something you need to keep in mind: although changing a URL is a simple procedure, you should not do it once it is already published. Doing so will affect your website negatively, as you will lose positioning and broken links or 404 errors (page not found) will be generated , so all this will affect SEO and users who want to enter the page through the old address will have a bad experience, thus worsening your SEO positioning in Prestashop. Although it is true that they can be easily solved with a redirection module, there is always a risk of losing visibility, so we do not recommend changing them.

SEO and URLs in Prestashop 1.7

Prestashop 1.7 has a section where we can see all the pages with their corresponding URLs, as well as configure different parameters to optimize SEO. It is accessed through Configure > Store parameters > Traffic & SEO > SEO and URLs. Once there, we will see all the pages with their respective URLs and, in the actions column, if we click on the pencil icon, we will access the editing of each page, where we can edit the different parameters that must be optimized for SEO. The following parameters must also be configured:

Redirect pages, the main new feature of PrestaShop 1.7

Redirect pages are the main change in PrestaShop 1.7 . This is a particularly interesting option for creating your product sheets. Until this latest version, product lifecycle management was much less convenient. Now you just need to include some redirect pages, depending on what you want to do when a page is no longer available. What are our options?

1. Error 404 : We let our page return the status of not found. We know that this practice is not recommended, but sometimes it is necessary.
2. 301 redirect : This is a permanent redirect. It is a way of telling search engines that this page is no longer active. In addition, we warn them that if they have indexed it, the “good” one is another. At the same time, we prevent users from feeling lost when they find this URL.
3. 302 redirect : similar to the previous one, but temporary. If we plan to recover this URL, this option is the best.

At Línea Gráfica we have developed the Prestashop 301, 302, 303 URL Redirects and 404 Module, with which you can create an unlimited number of redirects to optimize your store's SEO and eliminate 404 errors.

Take the module!

Description of the products in your online store

Here we come across the main problem of online stores : duplicate content . This can occur in two different ways:

1. Duplicated content from the supplier What can happen to you is that the supplier provides you with an XML file of the article or, directly, you copy the information from the supplier's website. You know the damage that duplicate content can do to you, so be original and write your own product descriptions. If you don't, you run the risk of having the same content as hundreds of other URLs that have the same supplier as you.
2. Duplicate content for similar products : In this case, the problem is more complex than the previous one. It consists of having products with similar characteristics, and therefore similar descriptions. The solution here is more difficult because you can have 2000 products with three variants. In this case, you can write an original description for each variant, which is a lot of work; establish canonical URLs, which is a little work but not very effective; or hire a programmer to create different variants on the same product page.

In this way, it is essential that you always keep these factors in mind and follow our advice to obtain the perfect product sheet .

How to position your e-commerce categories?

Something else that is fundamental in any e-commerce is the positioning of the product categories, for which you have to take into account several aspects:

• Categories must be indexed so that Google can include them in its results pages.
• On the other hand, a good category architecture is one of the most important aspects for SEO, essential for both Google and users to better understand the structure of your website.
• It is highly recommended to add a cluster of subcategories to improve internal linking and distribute Page Rank correctly.
• Add content to categories and use FAQ Schem markup.
• It is essential to correctly choose the category title tag , attacking a transactional keyword.
• It is also very important to add filters to the categories , something that will greatly improve the user experience.

By polishing these aspects, you will achieve top positions for your online store.

Integrate blog in your e-commerce with Prestashop

In addition to implementing SEO for your e-commerce through the different factors we have mentioned, it is essential to take into account the important role that the blog plays in capturing leads. A blog, properly integrated into your e-commerce, is a very powerful tool, as it will help you both to attract users interested in the products you sell and potential customers who are looking for information or have questions about the purchase they are thinking of making, allowing you to explain the advantages and characteristics of your products or services, and thus helping them to make up their minds and complete their purchase in your online store. Likewise, through the blog we can target informational keywords and it also works to improve the EAT (Experience, Authority and Trustworthiness) of our website, a factor that is increasingly important for positioning. The ideal way to include your blog in your e-commerce is to use WordPress . This system is easy, convenient, and offers numerous options, making it the best option for your e-commerce, as it also has SEO optimization that is very friendly to search engines. In addition, the best option is to install WordPress in a subfolder on your web server. There are also several Prestashop modules that will help you make this task much easier than it seems.

Monitoring WPO Loading Speed ​​in Prestashop

It is also essential to monitor the WPO or “Web Performance Optimization” loading speed in Prestashop for several reasons. One of the main reasons is the user experience , since an excessive loading time will cause those who visit the page to end up abandoning it, since a bad experience is generated, which is essential for the positioning of an ecommerce . In addition, Google assigns each website a crawl budget , which is nothing more than the time allocated for the robot to crawl the store's URLs. Thus, if the loading time of a URL is 5 seconds, when crawled by Google it will consume 5 seconds of that time. But if we reduce that speed to 1 second, the remaining 4 seconds will be used by Google to crawl other URLs on that website, so there will be more possibilities for Google to index a greater number of keywords from the ecommerce.

Server

When a user enters a website, he or she is making a request to the server to “return” the data hosted on that site. Therefore, the server will return all the data, in an orderly manner and as programmed by the web developer. Thus, the organization of the website will largely limit the server's response time to the client. In this way, choosing a good server is crucial for the website to obtain optimal speed, so you should look at the technical aspects of said server, such as:

• Storage capacity.
• The type of disk you use.
• The capacity of the RAM.
• The amount of data traffic.

You can choose between professional cloud servers , professional dedicated servers or VPS servers . As a general rule, we recommend dedicated servers, as they offer the best value for money, although this will depend on the needs of each business.

Cache

Cache is a fast-access memory. In the case of websites, it is used to store the web page, including its different pages, so that a user who has already visited that site does not have to make a request to the server again. This greatly improves the access speed or, in other words, the time it takes to load the web page . To activate this cache, you must include a few lines of code in the .htaccess file.

Image optimization in Prestashop

Optimizing the images you add to your ecommerce is also another key element to improve WPO. Therefore, you should configure them in a certain way so that they are fully optimized. First of all, we must take into account the type of file format or extension that our images will have. The most commonly used are:

• JPG : the most well-known and used, although due to its compression it loses quality each time the size of the image is reduced.
• PNG : You can add transparency and it does not produce quality loss, so it is a good option for use on websites.

• GIF : used to create animations.
• TIFF – This is a very heavy format and therefore not suitable for websites.
• WEBP – This other format focuses on lossless compression, making it the perfect choice for websites.

Thus, due to the characteristics of each of these extensions, most photos used on web pages are PNG, since they can be optimized without loss of quality. Secondly, to optimize images in Prestashop , we must define a resolution, to reduce the weight as much as possible. For example, if we are going to place an image in a space of 250px, it cannot have more than that number of pixels, because otherwise we will be wasting the space and, consequently, increasing the weight and speed with which our page loads. Finally, we cannot forget the HTML alt attribute for images, which is also essential for their optimization. With it, we explain to Google what the image represents, since it does not have the ability to "see" it. We must not forget that search engines cannot view images, so the way they understand the content is by analyzing the text that describes each image individually. Thus, if we implement the ALT attribute in the appropriate way, search engines will be able to know what the subject of each of our images is and place them in a good position. With the Prestashop Premium Image Optimizer and Webp Converter Module you can improve the quality of your images, increasing their sharpness and decreasing their size. In addition, you can convert them to the “Webp” format, which provides smaller images and is the most valued and recommended by Google. In short, this image format, which was also created by Google, is a file format to reduce the size of images and thus reduce their loading times.

Upload sitemap to Search Console

Sitemaps are files that provide information about different elements of a website, such as pages or videos, and the relationships between them. Search engines read these files in order to crawl sites more efficiently. Sitemaps thus provide information about which files on a site are most important. With the Multi-Language and Multi-Store Sitemaps Pro Module you can automatically generate sitemaps for all URLs in your store, in all languages ​​of your store, for all stores , and including product images, categories, and manufacturer . The module offers the possibility to create 4 types of sitemaps:

• Sitemap that groups the URLs of all your pages: Products.
• Sitemap that groups the URLs of all your pages: Categories.
• Sitemap that groups the URLs of all your pages: CMS.
• Sitemap that groups the URLs of all your pages: Manufacturers.

Additionally, it allows the configuration process to be very simple and independent for each sitemap .

• Choose the type of sitemap: products, categories, CMS or manufacturers.
• Select the store (multi-store).
• Select the indexing priority of the sitemap URLs from 0.1 to 1.0 relative to the URLs in your other sitemaps, with the “priority” tag.
• Indicates the frequency (day/week/month/year) at which changes occur on pages in the sitemap, with the “changefreq” tag.
• Whether or not to include images of products, categories and manufacturers within the
• Indicate whether or not you want to automatically inform the search engines Google, Bing and Ask when the sitemap is created.

One thing to keep in mind is that Google doesn't check sitemaps every time it crawls a website; it only checks them the first time it detects them and then only crawls them again when we ping it to let it know that they have been modified. We only need to notify Google when we upload a new sitemap or modify an old one. Additionally, there are several ways to submit a sitemap to Google:

• Through the "Sitemaps" report.
• With the ping tool.
• Insert the line https://example.com/my_sitemap.xml into your robots.txt file, but with the path to your sitemap. This way, the sitemap will be found the next time the robots.txt file is crawled.
• Use WebSub if you use Atom/RSS for your sitemap and want to notify Google and other search engines of changes.

However, submitting a sitemap is just a recommendation: it does not guarantee that Google will download it or use it to crawl URLs on your site.

And how to create a page with a site map?

The sitemap is a URL that shows all the pages of a website, except for the products. In other words, it is a visual representation of the website that helps users find the content in an orderly manner, which is why it is essential for the positioning and success of a website. It is normally located in the footer, so that it is a section that can be used when the information is not found in the drop-down menus. In addition, Prestashop can generate them automatically. This tool helps us to considerably reduce the depth of clicks and internal linking, which greatly favors navigation through a website.

Managing duplicate pages with canonicals

Canonical tags (rel=“canonical”) are a piece of HTML code that we use to define the main version to manage duplicate, near-duplicate and similar pages. That is, if there is identical or similar content for different URLs, we must use the canonical tag to specify which is the main version that should therefore be indexed. This is critical because Google doesn't like duplicate content, as it makes it harder for Google to know which version of the page to index since only one will be indexed, and which version of the page to rank for relevant queries, among other things. With the Prestashop Canonical SEO URLs + Google Hreflang Pro Module you can add canonical tags to your online store's homepage , as well as to product, category, CMS, manufacturer and supplier pages, avoiding duplicate content and improving SEO. The module will automatically add a canonical URL to all the mentioned pages. You can also automatically change the domain (if there is duplicate content between two domains), the protocol (if there is duplicate content between http and https) or remove parameters (if you have duplicate content due to URLs with parameters) in canonical URLs. Additionally, you can define custom canonical URLs.

Languages ​​and international SEO

When we talk about languages ​​and international SEO, we are referring to the action of trying to position ourselves in other countries , with the aim of getting those new clients or readers for our website. To achieve this, it is essential to adapt the semantic content and web structure of our page to the target audience of each country, in order to reach these new users. It is also necessary to add the corresponding hreflang tags . These programming elements are used as an indicator that a page should be shown to users from a specific country or language. They are very useful when creating content aimed at a local audience. The hreflang tag alerts search engines when a user searches in a particular language and expects to find results in that language, rather than a page with similar content in another language. For example, if you create an English version of your website's home page that was originally written in Spanish, you would tag it as “English” using hreflang = “en.” This will ensure that users with an IP address that search engines consider to be in an English-speaking country will be able to find your page translated into English, rather than in Spanish. The benefits of using this tag are that it will reduce your website's bounce rate and increase conversions by encouraging your target audience to reach the most appropriate version of your page. The Prestashop Canonical SEO URLs + Google Hreflang Pro module allows you to add this type of hreflang tags, in addition to its many other features, so with it you will improve the SEO of your page, the user experience and avoid duplicate content. In addition, it adds the default tag “x-default”, which works for users in countries for which the language is not configured on the website or for those who do not have the language configured in the browser, so together with the hreflang tags they are also essential for international SEO. We hope that this SEO guide for Prestashop will be helpful to you and that you will put all these tips into practice. Remember that at Línea Gráfica we are experts in offering comprehensive solutions for e-commerce , so don't hesitate to contact us if you want to implement or improve any aspect of your e-commerce.