I would like to talk about SEO for eCommerce stores based on the Prestashop platform: both basic points and some more advanced stuff which requires changing the Presta code and installing modules.
Let’s start by the beginning.
1- Define well the keywords you will be working with
It’s very important to think from which side you will attack before entering battle. Otherwise, you may end up dead in a very short time. You must sit down with plenty of time, pick up paper and pen, and write down the words you want to work with. For example, suppose you want to sell office furniture in the Spanish market. You would write down keywords such as office furniture, online sale of office furniture, office chair, office desk, etc.
But which are the relevant words to position your business? The best thing to do is ask the company that dominates the search market: Google. There’s a tool in Google Adwords which, until a few weeks ago, was great, and which has now been integrated in the keyword planner – a monstrosity which unfortunately continues to be the best beacon in the dark. By using the tool “Enter or upload keywords to see their performance” you can find the number of global and local searches for those words which take place every month, whether those keywords are relevant, and what the competition is.
It is recommended to always use words with the relevant average competition and number of searches, taking the usual variables into account: time and money. Do you have the time and money to create a contents and social network relevance strategy that gives you visibility when competing for those words? If the answer is yes, go ahead. If the answer is no or you don’t know, let it go: you will lose your time and money.
Another tool that can help you in this sense, even though it’s a payment tool, is Semrush, with competition results honed by SEO and SEM. A great application that is well worth your money.
2- Fill all the fields in the product info sheet
Leaving the obvious aside – don’t copy descriptions from other websites, enter descriptions by hand –you should ALWAYS enter the meta titles, meta descriptions, and meta labels in the product info sheets, and include a coherent URL that aids SEO. The same goes for your categories and manufacturers. This information is crucial for Google, and makes it possible to provide Google with much more SEO-friendly data when it crawls through your product info sheets.
3- Sitemap and robots.txt
These two extremely important files are sometimes not generated, due to an oversight or to ignorance. The sitemap (which you should later send to Google via the Google Webmaster Tools) is generated by means of the Google Sitemap by PrestaShop module, in the module SEO tab. The robots file is generated in Tools > Prestashop 1.4 generators and in Preferences > SEO & URLs in Prestashop 1.5.
Always check that your robots.txt file is “hindering” the indexing of the pages in your sitemap.
4- Site speed
Very important. Never overlook your website speed. Most likely, you will have a dedicated server sharing an IP with 300 “neighbors” (you can find this by means of the Majestic SEO Neighbourhood Checker). At the very least, have your website load as fast as possible. You can achieve this by using the cache and by deactivating the recompilation. Recompiling is used in development environments to reload Prestashop templates, CSS, and Javascripts from scratch in order to see the changes that are applied to the front-office code (what users see). Once you are done developing and are in the production environment, deactivate it to enable the website to work properly.
In Prestashop 1.4, go to preferences > performance and check:
- Force compilation > No
- Cache > Yes
- Use CCC for stylesheets
- Use CCC for the JavaScript code
- Reduce the HTML code after executing the Smarty compilation
- In tools > generators activate Apache Optimization when you generate the htaccess
In Prestashop 1.5, go to advanced parameters > performance and check:
- “Never recompile the template files”
- Activate cache
- Use CCC for stylesheets
- Use CCC for the JavaScript code
- Reduce the HTML code after executing the Smarty compilation
- JavaScript compression in the HTML code after executing the Smarty compilation
- Apache optimization
Another option which you might consider is hosting CSS, Javascripts, and images in external serversso that the page skeleton loads more quickly. This option is included in the sections I have just mentioned as “Media servers (use only when CCC is activated)”. Prestashop offers integration directly from its official modules using Amazon Cloudfront (paid service).
5- URLs and duplicate titles
One of the problems which Prestashop hasn’t troubleshot yet is duplicate pages. This happens in any website which has pagination for category, brand, and supplier pages. Product page 1, 2, 3… generates repeated titles, meta descriptions, and duplicate URLs (the URL is the same one, only parameters change). You can find them straight away via Google Webmaster Tools (in Search look > HTML improvements).
Unfortunately, the two only ways to get rid of this is including all products in a single page, with no pagination (impossible for large catalogs) or else working on the Prestashop core to change the title, page meta description, and URL.
6- Redirecting from old to new pages
A very common mistake in migrations. Suppose that I come from osCommerce and migrate to Prestashop. I had 700 products indexed in Google, 20 CMS pages, and 30 categories. Those pages will be left orphaned, as the osCommerce URL structure has nothing to do with Prestashop.
The best option is to create a permanent 301 redirect to tell Google that where your former URL used to be (http://www.domain.com/category/cat003-product-name-p-8576.html) now it will find http://www.domain.com/category/product-name.html
It’s best to use a redirect-generating tool like this one and be patient, because you’ve got to do it by hand.
7- URL *^Ǩ+`!!! Ids
Prestashop insists on associating an ID with category, manufacturer, supplier, CMS page, and product URLs. This, in addition to being ugly, is not useful for SEO. You can fix it by changing the core or buy a module to remove those IDs. We will all be grateful. Including Google.
8- URL accents
One of the bugs in Prestashop 1.5 in Spanish is the fact that it can generate this URL for the product “Radio eléctrica portátil de baño”: http://www.domain.com/radios-de-baño/Radio-eléctrica-portátil-de-baño. Yes, really.
There are free patches and payment modules that can fix it. Please fix it.
9- Structured data
Google Rich Snippets help to send structured data to the search engine (manufacturer, price, delivery period, delivery cost, etc.) and can serve to include rating stars in the product reviews in page searches and even include ratings from services like eKomi. Here is an example of how good the final result looks.
10- Integrate Schema.org
Schema.org is a directive that tells search engines how to classify the contents of a website. It works for Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex (Russia). The key is the “itemtype” tag which tells the search engine whether something is a website, a store, or another service. The full list of data that can be included in Schema for “store” is here: http://schema.org/Store. In the case presented at the beginning (office furniture) you would want to be classified as Furniture Store http://schema.org/FurnitureStore
I hope that these tips work for you. Implement them carefully and never cease to work on and optimize your in-page SEO. There is nothing worse than working on the off-page SEO to achieve relevance and then having Google find that your website is a mess.
