[Prestashop tips] 10+ PrestaShop SEO guidelines

What is SEO?

SEO refers to search engine optimization, or the process of optimizing a Prestashop website in order to make it easy to find via search engines like Google.

So how do you optimize your Prestashop site content for Google SEO? Let Buy-Addons lead the way!

Tips 1: Enable SSL/HTTPS for your Prestashop website

How to do this? you can read our post: How to enable HTTPS/SSL in Prestashop System?

Tips 2: Set up Friend URL mode in Prestashop Backoffice

Go to Prestashop Backoffice > Shop Parameters > Traffic & SEO > SEO & URLs

Friendly URL: Choose Yes
Accented URL: Yes if you are using non-latin characters (non-latin language) ; No for all the latin charsets, latin languages, your SEO will be better without this option.
Redirect to the canonical URL: if your Prestashop website is developing and you are working, chaning it -> choose option: 302 Moved Temporarily (recommended while setting up your store), if your site is done and go to Live -> Choose option: 301 Moved Permanently (recommended once you have gone live)

Tips 3: Check Friendly URL, Friendly URL Meta title, Meta description for all pages: Products, Category, Supplier, Brands, CMS (Pages in Prestashop 1.7, CMS in Prestashop 1.6), Contact Page

When edit a element: Products, Category, Supplier, Brands, CMS, Contact… you can change their Friendly URL, Friendly URL Meta title, Meta description

For an example for a product, you can change it in SEO tab

Tips 4: Generate Sitemap for your Prestashop store, then upload it into Google webmaster

Go to Backoffice > Modules > Module Manager, Click Configure Google sitemap module

Tips 5: Check ALT attribute for all images in Prestashop website. You can read more What is Image Alt Text, How to Write It, and Why It Matters to SEO?

You can use an online tools for scan all images in your Prestashop website, then modify to add ALT attribute (Caption) to miss images

Online tools for check Image Alt Test: https://seositecheckup.com/tools/image-alt-test

Tips 6: Add rel=”nofollow” to your links

What is rel=nofollow?

Using rel=nofollow tells search engine crawlers not to follow a link.
It indicates that a link is not endorsed by the original author or publisher of the page.
It is also used when a link is included due to a commercial (paid) relationship.
Read more: https://varvy.com/rel/nofollow.html

You can use an online tools for scan all links in your Prestashop website: https://varvy.com/tools/linkcount/

Then add rel=”nofollow” to miss links

Tips 7: Check correctly Heading tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6) in your Prestashop website

Heading tags are using with the code H1 till H6. It is important that the heading tags are used in the right way: if an H3 tag is used, the H1 and H2 tags should also be used.

Example: h1 -> h2 -> h3 ->h4 ->h5 -> Correctly structure for a website

h1 -> h3 -> h4 -> h2 or h1 -> h3 -> h4 -> Incorectly structure

You can use a online heading tags checking like https://www.overthetopseo.com/free-tools/free-html-headings-checker/

Tips 8: remove meta robots tag in your Prestashop theme

Some Prestashop Theme contains this tag