How to optimize your SEO with Prestashop?

The first area of SEO optimization concerns the construction of your e-commerce site and the structure of its pages. Here are the different technical aspects to work on to improve your search engine ranking.

Your PrestaShop online store's markup schema will enable search engine spiders to better understand the nature and organization of your site's content. Not to be confused with the site's layout, this structured data follows a standardized format written into the source code of each of your pages. It is not visible to the user, but is intended exclusively for robots.

Among the technical SEO optimizations, you also need to propose a tree structure adapted to your visitors. The aim is to make your online store easier to navigate, with easy-to-understand headings and product categories based on user queries.

Be aware that a slow e-commerce site will automatically be at a disadvantage compared with a fast site in the search results. So choose a theme that loads quickly, and test its loading speed.

Make sure your site is 100 % responsive. In other words, it must display correctly on all devices, computer as well as smartphone and tablet, while having a design that adapts to each support to guarantee the best user experience.

Redirection rules are important technical factors, both for SEO and for the user experience of your visitors. If certain pages on your site have been removed, you need to set up a process for transferring one URL to another, called redirects.

Internal linking refers to links that point to another page in your online store. With a positive impact on SEO, this linkage can be created manually or via specific PrestaShop modules such as "SEO InternalLinking".

For good SEO, be sure to offer visitors complete product sheets with all essential fields: product name, images, description, features, variations, part number, associated categories, quantity, etc.

Meta tags are information about the nature and content of a page in your online store. They are added to the page header by means of HTML markers. Be sure to include title and description tags respecting the imposed format in terms of number of characters.

To make yourself more visible on a search results page following a user query, you'll need to pay particular attention to your category pages. In particular, each of them should focus on a main keyword. Likewise, for referencing purposes, you'll need to use words belonging to the same semantic field as the keyword.

From an SEO point of view, your site map helps search engine spiders find the different pages of your site. It also allows you to highlight certain key pages, such as your category, brand and product pages. Note that PrestaShop generates this site map by default.

Search engines also evaluate the quality of your content to determine your site's relevance to a query. To better understand the purpose of your e-commerce site, they will analyze your keywords, paragraph structure, semantic consistency and even the originality of your content. Take great care with your content to improve your site's visibility.

Backlinks play a fundamental role in the natural referencing of your e-commerce site. They will help you improve your site's reputation with search engines. Backlinks are hypertext links placed within content that link to a page on another site. From the search engines' point of view, these are considered "votes" and can have a positive impact on your ranking. Quality backlinks, which come from sites with good domain authority, are therefore beneficial for your SEO.

Discover all our tips for optimizing your online store's SEO in our PrestaShop SEO guide, by following the link below: