Prestashop is an open source CMS for ecommerce that, over time, has become a solid platform. Thanks to its friendly and intuitive environment that facilitates maintenance tasks and its large user community. At Sinapsis we consider it an ideal content manager for online stores that are not going to have a large number of references and with not particularly complex catalogs.
From Prestashop we can highlight its large catalog of templates and modules that allow us to customize the user experience to the maximum, its ID identification system that allows you to quickly locate products and avoid duplications and, especially, that it is an SEO friendly platform, that is, It is a CMS that is already basic to work the SEO of the website. In any case, a few tips on how to optimize SEO in this increasingly popular CMS in our country are worthwhile.
Use a light theme
Prestashop has a wide variety of themes to choose from. It’s easy to give in to design and forget about positioning. And it is that the best songs are not only the most beautiful. The best themes are the clearest, the most attractive, but above all, they are the fastest.
Also keep in mind that most of the searches will be directed to your Home. So you can afford to create an index page with more content and that is slower to load; but focus on cleaning your product sheets as much as possible.
Generate a Sitemap
The Sitemap is a page that shows the structure of our website. It helps search robots to better navigate and index our website. The recommended way is to use Google Sitemap.
To generate our Sitemap in Prestashop we simply have to go to Modules and services> Modules and services and write “Google Sitemap” in the search box. Install it. And after that, we will be able to set the sitemap settings (for example, which pages should be displayed, how often it is updated, etc.). In this way, our Siremap will be generated as an XML file that is visible only to bots and will tell them where they can find this or that page. It is like a GPS for search robots.
Optimize the use of modules
The loading speed is a vital element in the usability of the page. The longer it takes to load the page, the more possibility there is that we receive fewer visits. That is why it is vital that we deactivate all the modules that we are not using and, even, that we uninstall them. Although it is important that we do not eliminate them as we may need them in the future.
We also have to take into account that Prestashop includes analysis modules to inform us about sales statistics. If we carry this analysis with an external manager, these modules are unnecessary so we can deactivate them.
In fact, there are even themes that incorporate improved versions of the modules that the CMS itself already brings. Thinking about SEO, if we do not need these improvements, it is preferable to use the own addons instead of the theme.
Maximize loading speed
In fact, Prestashop itself is quite fast, but we can always do something to improve it. In fact, they have additional settings to increase the speed of our ecommerce. Here are some of them:
– We go to Preferences> Performance, Smarty section, we set Force Compilation to “No” and Cache to “Yes”.
– We go to Preferences> Performance, CCC section, we enable all the points except “High Risk HTML Compression”.
Optimize Search Results Tab
As we explained at the beginning, one of the advantages of this CMS is that it is adapted to help us in the SEO of our ecommerce. But that requires a little effort on our part. It is important to fill in the information in the Search Results Sheet of the SEO window of the platform. If we only fill in the usual data (product name, summary and description) Google will generate the information it shows in the search engine from the content of the page. And it is not always the best.
It is important to fill in the Meta-title and Meta-Description fields of the SEO tab, looking at the sample that Prestashop shows us to see how the result would look.
The Legend Field in the images
In version 1.7 of Prestashop, when entering the Information option of the images of the products we have an option that is “Legend”. There we have the option to indicate if it is the Cover Image ”and include a small text. It would be a mistake to repeat the title of the product. It is advisable to put additional information that describes the product and that allows us to use long-tail keywords.
Adapt the URL
Every time we create a product file in Prestashop, the CMS generates a URL automatically. In the SEO section of the product sheet we will find a field called Friendly URL auto-completed with the title of the product with hyphens instead of spaces.
But it may be that, for SEO reasons, we are interested in modifying this URL. For example, let’s imagine the following product sheet, a Seiko Captain Willard watch. The Product Title is “Captain Willard”, so Prestashop generates the URL captain-willard.html. But we are also interested in the keyword “seiko watch”. So in that field we can add it by modifying the URL in the following way: relo-seiko-capitan-willard.html.
There are many other tips to follow, such as choosing natural words for the content, remembering to include text in the descriptions of the categories, following a suitable likbuilding strategy and others that are not only typical of this CMS, they are general SEO issues.