SEO for Prestashop: 12 + 5 Points to Consider
Posted: Wed Jan 22, 2025 10:24 am
1. Titles:
Titles are still a very important factor in SEO strategy today. Therefore, we must follow some basic rules. To start with, keep in mind that you have to think about SEO but also about the user. Don't forget that the title will appear in the search SERPs and, for this reason, it has to attract the customer to click. The same goes for the description, don't think of something 100% SEO, but something that has the keywords and that encourages the user to enter. Regarding the title, try to keep it to no more than 70 characters, since this is the character limit used by Google.
2. Product descriptions:
One of the main errors that we find in many stores is duplicate content. This can be caused mainly by two factors, one of the most common is that the supplier of our products provides us with an xml file with the information of these, which we enter into our database. This factor automatically causes us to have duplicate content with other sites that have also obtained mlm marketing list the same XML data from the same supplier. The second factor that causes duplicate content is that in many cases we have very similar products that have few variations in their content, that is, we have products that contain so little information that we find that if we compare them with other products that we have, the variation in terms of content is minimal. This causes, in this case, Google to consider that we have duplicate content internally.
To solve this duplicate content we can take different actions. The main and perhaps best option, although we must always evaluate the situation, is to create unique and relevant content for each product. I know that it is a very laborious job, and that it costs money, but nobody said that optimizing an online store was simple and fast. In addition, we must take into account that having duplicate content can lead to an SEO penalty, as we discussed in our post about types of penalties, which you can read here .
Another option to solve duplicate content is to use the canonicals instruction indicating the parent page of the entire set of pages that can be considered as duplicate content.
Improve your SEO!
Therefore, if we can afford to create unique content, this will always be the best option. If not, we should go for the canonical option. And if this is not viable, then we can do a mix of the two options.
In terms of optimization, I will tell you a tip that can help you a lot. And that is that Prestashop has 100% customizable translations, a factor that allows us to play around a bit. For example, the “Featured Products” module that shows us the title “Featured Products” on the home screen can be perfectly translated as “Featured clothing items” or even “Trendy clothing for this summer”. Here it is a matter of imagination and knowing how to manage these modifications well.
3. Categories:
Each page is an option to position content. That is why we must not forget about product categories. Each category must have an image and a well-crafted description that allows us to improve positioning by the criteria we want. In addition, we must create a well-organized and structured hierarchy of categories that provides logic to the website.
4. Product images:
Although the latest change in Google Images significantly affected the traffic it brought to sites, it is still an important source of traffic for some projects. Therefore, it is important to take care of the entire image section by using a file name that contains information that provides value to the user, using keywords that help us in the search process. Ideally, the words should be separated with a hyphen rather than an underscore. And take advantage of this to put the alt in the images .
5. H1, H2 and others:
The H1, H2… tags are designed to give relevance to certain areas of the pages. It is understood that what is inside the H1 will be more important than what is inside the H2, so let's use this wisely, let's not put the H1 in the logo as we can find on many websites, since this does not add anything semantically to the page. The logo should never be H1, it should be the main title of the page. If it is a product, it should be the name of the product and the H2 a brief description.
6. Microformats:
Improve your SEO!
Microformats will allow us to increase the number of clicks mainly due to their visual impact on the Google results page. Now, let's use microformats with a bit of logic, since people have started to use microformats for everything and Google is starting to penalize this type of actions.
Therefore, do not use microformats just for the sake of it, use microformats if the information is available. I personally recommend using the following microformats in an e-commerce:
Video: If we have any video on the product.
Price: http://schema.org/Offer
Anyway, if you want to see more microformats you can access the schema.org website where you will find all the microformats that we can use.
7. www or without www:
It's something that surprises me, but sometimes I still see projects that don't have a 301 redirect between www and non-www domains. This is something basic that we need to control.
8. Store URLs:
Just like titles, URLs are an important factor in the SEO optimization of a website, so it is a point that we must pay special attention to. Although it may seem untrue, some eCommerce sites still have to include the friendly URL option, a factor that I think should be the default at this point. In the case of Prestashop, we must activate this option from “Preferences-> SEO and URLs”, and at the bottom we will activate “Friendly Links”. By simply doing this, we already have some “nice” friendly URLs, and I say “nice” because Prestashop has the habit of putting the identifier in the URL, which gives us a URL like www.domain.es/123-category.
If we want to remove the identifier from the URL, then we have to install a fantastic module that costs €50 and is called “ Prestashop PrettyURL Improve SEO ”. With this plugin we will be able to remove this identifier from the URLs of our eCommerce.
In this area I am going to comment on another tip that may be helpful, and that is that if the friendly URLs do not work for you, it is possibly because you do not have the mod_rewrite directive activated in Apache.
9. Creating sitemaps:
Once we have all the products with their categories correctly optimized, both in terms of titles and friendly URLs, we must create the sitemap and upload it to the webmaster tools to somewhat improve the indexability of our project.
10. Mobile version:
Improve your SEO!
Nowadays, it is no longer an option, but a necessity. Having an eCommerce without a mobile-friendly website is a waste of money. And I'm not referring to having an app, but basically having a Responsive version, that is, a website that adapts to the screen of any device from the same URL. If you want more information, you can access this presentation we gave at the SEO Clinic where we talked about Responsive Web Design .
11. 404 Links:
For quite some time now, Google has been improving the user experience, and giving a 404 error is not the best experience. For this reason, check Webmaster Tools from time to time for 404 errors on our pages and try to solve them. Oh, and we also need to take care of the links on our website to the outside, so use tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Scrutiny where, apart from a lot of information that will be useful for our OnPage SEO, we will find a section where we will see the incoming and outgoing links that give 404.
12. WPO:
Google has said it many times through Matt Cutts, WPO is a fundamental factor in SEO positioning, therefore, we must improve it no matter what. To do this we must solve several factors, the main one will be to have a good hosting, if the hosting we have is not good, because it suffers outages or the speed is low, there is little we can do. In any case, we have many alternatives to have a quality hosting, from companies like Factoria Digital that have hosting optimized for Prestashop, to companies like Comvive whose main business is dedicated servers. Now, if your knowledge of systems is low, do not get involved with a dedicated server because it will be very difficult for you to maintain it.
Even so, if you have a good server, you should start optimizing the platform to make it as fast as possible. As always, the ideal is to hire an expert, but since Prestashop has some options to improve it from the control panel, we will discuss them below. You can access these options from the Prestashop control panel through the “Advanced Parameters->Performance” menu option.
However, before we start to touch on these topics, I recommend that you run speed tests using tools such as GT-Matrix or WebPagetest.org so that we can see how we are progressing in terms of performance.
12.1. Enable Smarty Cache:
In case you don't know, Smarty is a template engine for PHP. Its main objective is to separate the presentation (HTML/CSS) from the application logic. In this way, we manage to separate the entire layout part of the PHP code that would be the application logic.
Titles are still a very important factor in SEO strategy today. Therefore, we must follow some basic rules. To start with, keep in mind that you have to think about SEO but also about the user. Don't forget that the title will appear in the search SERPs and, for this reason, it has to attract the customer to click. The same goes for the description, don't think of something 100% SEO, but something that has the keywords and that encourages the user to enter. Regarding the title, try to keep it to no more than 70 characters, since this is the character limit used by Google.
2. Product descriptions:
One of the main errors that we find in many stores is duplicate content. This can be caused mainly by two factors, one of the most common is that the supplier of our products provides us with an xml file with the information of these, which we enter into our database. This factor automatically causes us to have duplicate content with other sites that have also obtained mlm marketing list the same XML data from the same supplier. The second factor that causes duplicate content is that in many cases we have very similar products that have few variations in their content, that is, we have products that contain so little information that we find that if we compare them with other products that we have, the variation in terms of content is minimal. This causes, in this case, Google to consider that we have duplicate content internally.
To solve this duplicate content we can take different actions. The main and perhaps best option, although we must always evaluate the situation, is to create unique and relevant content for each product. I know that it is a very laborious job, and that it costs money, but nobody said that optimizing an online store was simple and fast. In addition, we must take into account that having duplicate content can lead to an SEO penalty, as we discussed in our post about types of penalties, which you can read here .
Another option to solve duplicate content is to use the canonicals instruction indicating the parent page of the entire set of pages that can be considered as duplicate content.
Improve your SEO!
Therefore, if we can afford to create unique content, this will always be the best option. If not, we should go for the canonical option. And if this is not viable, then we can do a mix of the two options.
In terms of optimization, I will tell you a tip that can help you a lot. And that is that Prestashop has 100% customizable translations, a factor that allows us to play around a bit. For example, the “Featured Products” module that shows us the title “Featured Products” on the home screen can be perfectly translated as “Featured clothing items” or even “Trendy clothing for this summer”. Here it is a matter of imagination and knowing how to manage these modifications well.
3. Categories:
Each page is an option to position content. That is why we must not forget about product categories. Each category must have an image and a well-crafted description that allows us to improve positioning by the criteria we want. In addition, we must create a well-organized and structured hierarchy of categories that provides logic to the website.
4. Product images:
Although the latest change in Google Images significantly affected the traffic it brought to sites, it is still an important source of traffic for some projects. Therefore, it is important to take care of the entire image section by using a file name that contains information that provides value to the user, using keywords that help us in the search process. Ideally, the words should be separated with a hyphen rather than an underscore. And take advantage of this to put the alt in the images .
5. H1, H2 and others:
The H1, H2… tags are designed to give relevance to certain areas of the pages. It is understood that what is inside the H1 will be more important than what is inside the H2, so let's use this wisely, let's not put the H1 in the logo as we can find on many websites, since this does not add anything semantically to the page. The logo should never be H1, it should be the main title of the page. If it is a product, it should be the name of the product and the H2 a brief description.
6. Microformats:
Improve your SEO!
Microformats will allow us to increase the number of clicks mainly due to their visual impact on the Google results page. Now, let's use microformats with a bit of logic, since people have started to use microformats for everything and Google is starting to penalize this type of actions.
Therefore, do not use microformats just for the sake of it, use microformats if the information is available. I personally recommend using the following microformats in an e-commerce:
Video: If we have any video on the product.
Price: http://schema.org/Offer
Anyway, if you want to see more microformats you can access the schema.org website where you will find all the microformats that we can use.
7. www or without www:
It's something that surprises me, but sometimes I still see projects that don't have a 301 redirect between www and non-www domains. This is something basic that we need to control.
8. Store URLs:
Just like titles, URLs are an important factor in the SEO optimization of a website, so it is a point that we must pay special attention to. Although it may seem untrue, some eCommerce sites still have to include the friendly URL option, a factor that I think should be the default at this point. In the case of Prestashop, we must activate this option from “Preferences-> SEO and URLs”, and at the bottom we will activate “Friendly Links”. By simply doing this, we already have some “nice” friendly URLs, and I say “nice” because Prestashop has the habit of putting the identifier in the URL, which gives us a URL like www.domain.es/123-category.
If we want to remove the identifier from the URL, then we have to install a fantastic module that costs €50 and is called “ Prestashop PrettyURL Improve SEO ”. With this plugin we will be able to remove this identifier from the URLs of our eCommerce.
In this area I am going to comment on another tip that may be helpful, and that is that if the friendly URLs do not work for you, it is possibly because you do not have the mod_rewrite directive activated in Apache.
9. Creating sitemaps:
Once we have all the products with their categories correctly optimized, both in terms of titles and friendly URLs, we must create the sitemap and upload it to the webmaster tools to somewhat improve the indexability of our project.
10. Mobile version:
Improve your SEO!
Nowadays, it is no longer an option, but a necessity. Having an eCommerce without a mobile-friendly website is a waste of money. And I'm not referring to having an app, but basically having a Responsive version, that is, a website that adapts to the screen of any device from the same URL. If you want more information, you can access this presentation we gave at the SEO Clinic where we talked about Responsive Web Design .
11. 404 Links:
For quite some time now, Google has been improving the user experience, and giving a 404 error is not the best experience. For this reason, check Webmaster Tools from time to time for 404 errors on our pages and try to solve them. Oh, and we also need to take care of the links on our website to the outside, so use tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Scrutiny where, apart from a lot of information that will be useful for our OnPage SEO, we will find a section where we will see the incoming and outgoing links that give 404.
12. WPO:
Google has said it many times through Matt Cutts, WPO is a fundamental factor in SEO positioning, therefore, we must improve it no matter what. To do this we must solve several factors, the main one will be to have a good hosting, if the hosting we have is not good, because it suffers outages or the speed is low, there is little we can do. In any case, we have many alternatives to have a quality hosting, from companies like Factoria Digital that have hosting optimized for Prestashop, to companies like Comvive whose main business is dedicated servers. Now, if your knowledge of systems is low, do not get involved with a dedicated server because it will be very difficult for you to maintain it.
Even so, if you have a good server, you should start optimizing the platform to make it as fast as possible. As always, the ideal is to hire an expert, but since Prestashop has some options to improve it from the control panel, we will discuss them below. You can access these options from the Prestashop control panel through the “Advanced Parameters->Performance” menu option.
However, before we start to touch on these topics, I recommend that you run speed tests using tools such as GT-Matrix or WebPagetest.org so that we can see how we are progressing in terms of performance.
12.1. Enable Smarty Cache:
In case you don't know, Smarty is a template engine for PHP. Its main objective is to separate the presentation (HTML/CSS) from the application logic. In this way, we manage to separate the entire layout part of the PHP code that would be the application logic.