You've got a Prestashop site, and you're keeping a close eye on the orders and sales generated by your online store, but do you know how easily search engines can access your site? That's where the XML sitemap comes in. What's behind this somewhat technical term, and what role does it play in the SEO of your Prestashop store? In this article, we'll explain what a sitemap file is, and why it's so important for the SEO of your online business.
What is an XML sitemap?
The sitemap is a file containing a list of all the pages on your site available for indexing by search engines. It includes the urls of category pages, product sheets, blog or news articles, images and videos present on your website. It's a hierarchical mapping of all the pages intended to be read by search engines like Google and others.
XML is a specific file format for adding metadata to provide additional information about your pages, such as the priority of urls, when they were last updated and how often they are updated.
Your Prestashop store may have several separate sitemap files, depending on the type of page (category, product sheet, blog post) or the type of content (image, video). This can be useful if your Prestashop store is large: in fact, a sitemap can contain no more than 50,000 urls.
In the case of a multilingual Prestashop store, dedicated sitemaps by language or country are generated so that robots can fully understand the international context of your site.
Some pages in your Prestashop store have less added value, such as the order tunnel, shopping cart and module pages. We therefore advise you not to add them to the XML sitemap.
In any case, it's important to regularly update your Prestashop store's XML sitemap file so that search engine spiders can find recent content added to your website.
The role of the XML sitemap in the SEO of your Prestashop store
During their crawl, search engine robots will read the contents of your Sitemap. By doing so, they'll be able to access your store's pages more quickly than if they didn't have access to this file. The automatic crawling of your site by search engine crawlers may miss pages that need to be crawled, particularly if your store doesn't have a good internal mesh.
Your Prestashop Sitemap therefore plays an essential role in helping search engines crawl your pages. By setting up an xml sitemap, you speed up the crawling of your content, increasing its chances of being indexed and ranked in search results. When search engines encounter a well-structured XML sitemap, they are less likely to come across error-prone pages such as 404 pages or duplicate content. This makes crawling easier and more efficient, saving you crawl budget - the time Google spends crawling your online store.
However, it's important to bear in mind that putting a url in the sitemap doesn't necessarily guarantee that it will be indexed, as the primary aim of this file is to facilitate page exploration.
When should you use an XML sitemap for your Prestashop?
The sitemap is a good SEO practice for all Prestashop stores. It is strongly recommended when :
- Your online store is new
- It does not yet benefit from external links pointing to it (also known as backlinks).
- Internal linking, i.e. the relationship between the different pages of your site, is not optimal
- Your Prestashop store is large, with a large number of images, videos or articles.
As you can see, the XML sitemap is an excellent way of providing Google and other search engines with the relevant pages they need to take into account. It acts as a table of contents to help robots explore your Prestashop store.
Now that you know more about the nature of this file and its role for SEO, we invite you to read our tips on how to automatically generate a sitemap with Prestashop and how to validate it with search engines.
Conclusion
Need help creating your sitemap? At Soledis, our webmarketing experts are available to advise you or implement the sitemap for your online store.
