SEO - How are you taking this?

[Rod_]

These last two months I was reading pretty much about SEO and also SEO in E-Commerce websites.
Most of you know how to improve your website for search engines with all those tips and techniques from meta tags to keywords in content and that stuff.
Now, how are you taking this on your Presta site?. We all know our sites are practically new just because we are using a new E-Commerce system, but can anyone tell us how are you improving your web's position in Google?. Does anyone have his presta web on the 5 or 10 positions in Google?. What techniques are you implementing or checking for this?.

By my side, I started looking at the Title, Description, Keywords on content and checking the products tags. This using the WEBCEO software and Google Keyword Tool. In this way I can see and compare how is the competition.
I think I'll able to show some results in the next couple of weeks or months.

[Soha 8084]

hello Rod_

for me am trying to improve my site position using the following:
Meta title
Meta Description
Meta Keywords
tags
Google ste map

install site map module -> configure - > generate Xml file
then go to google add your site then add the Xml file you generated

google will then cruel to your site and index all links of your site in Xml

am finding presrashop very helpful and easy to manage these stuff

looking forward to hear about you site position

[Paul C]

Remember to put the sitemap in the robots.txt file

SITEMAP: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Works wonders

Paul

[1eyebrow]

and


Try these tips too when using Preatacart:

Enable and configure search friendly urls.
Use your alt tags every time you add images such as logos or category headers.
Don't use more then 16-20 meta tags per page.
Don't repeat links to the homepage or display links to the home page on your home page. (Google PR Rank Tip)
Repeat top 5 key words at least twice in a page when ever possible, however you should avoid duplicate sentences, and series of words.

Thats a great SEO foundation. And set up Google analytics on your site for sure! Its integrated into prestashop already, and it gives you better statistics about your site usage then even God has on your website, lol Seriously!

[Soha 8084]

Paul

yeah I forgot to mention that thanks

1eyebrow

great tips will apply them as am still uplaoding my products yet .. it is taking too much time hope will get done this week

I already use freindly Url and loving it

I can't wait to update to the new final release of this great e-commerce software

[Rod_]

...
install site map module -> configure - > generate Xml file
then go to google add your site then add the Xml file you generated
...

Don't know why but I can't generate the XML file! =/
* Error: Cannot create sitemap.xml file.
Any solution?.

Other thing is that in my meta title I put some characters like these: " & ", " ' " and on internet they looks well but if I take a look at the page source it shows me "

&

", "

' 

".
Is this bad?. How will Google read my tags?. I saw other sites with this characters and in the page code they looks well.

[Paul C]

These are termed html entities are are perfectly fine. You can't use a & in html, so you have to replace it with & to display properly. Worry not!

Paul

[Rod_]

These are termed html entities are are perfectly fine. You can't use a & in html, so you have to replace it with & to display properly. Worry not!

Paul

That's great. It's a relief to know that =)
Thx again Paul!.

[Rod_]

Keywords...
How are you working with your primary and most important keywords on your site?.
I know that we have to put it on titles, description and as possible in the content. In our case using PS, where are you writing this keywords?. I'm trying to put them in some featured products from the home page (short description). For example in my case my most import keywords are: women's clothing, women's clothes and clothing. My site is: http://www.dmclothing.com.au .

I'm not sure how much effective is this.
How are you using your keywords??.

[iYann]

I had read somewhere that "meta keywords tags" on each page should not exceed 900 characters including spaces for google to accept it.

I decided to invest time on keywords, description etc... to create a whole vocabulary for my site, using the same sets of keywords in every page and so on. But instead of doing that keyword job one page at a time, I decided to create an Excel sheet to input all meta data into this table for 35 products to start with !
It took me a few days to make that list, with the help of Google Keyword tools I chose the most accurate keywords for each and every product ! I usually had 800 characters per product and the same amount for each categories and subcategories

...And then... I tested a first product...
I got an error in PrestaShop saying the maximum number of characters is 255 for meta keywords. The exact message is:
"2 errors
the field META keywords (English (English)) is too long (255 chars max)
the field META keywords (English (English)) is too long (255 chars max)
"
That's bad ! Why is that ?

Next problem is with categories: I did a copy&paste;of my keywords in the meta keywords field (small field for 800 characters, isn't it ? ;-))
Clicked Save... How glad was I to see the green message "Update successful !"
The thing is I tested the category page online, only to realize it had only included the first 128 characters of my keyword list...

Last thing I noticed (small problem) is about the alt tags for images. When I upload an image for a product, I include a title tag, for example: "20W halogen lamp". Looking at the source code, the alt tag is applied to the medium 80x80px images, but not to the large 300x300px images. On that one the alt tag is left empty:
img src="/img/p/13-61-large.jpg" alt="" id="bigpic" title="20W halogen lamp"

Any comments ?

[iYann]

For the info, if it can be useful to anyone, here is the Excel table I did, in that image:
[image deleted]
(sorry for the external link, the image won't upload...)

In my case, I have the following columns:

- Ref#

- Photo

- Category

- Product title & photo title

- Meta title & window title

- Meta keyword tags (255 characters max)

- Tags (16 tags max)

- Meta description tags (limit of 170 characters, best 155 characters)

- Image caption

- Short description

- Full description

- Weight in lbs and kg

- Dimensions in inches (depth, width, height)

- Dimensions in cm (depth, width, height)

- Retail price ($c)

- Accessories available

[Rod_]

Maybe you have to change the chars length of that field in the DB:

Go to table ps_product_lang and change the length of those meta fields from 255 to whatever you want. By the way I'm not sure if there could happen an error or something like that.

[iYann]

Thank you Rod, will look into this first thing in the morning; I might ask you more about this when I'm into the code, because I'm new to this and I don't want to mess the site...

[Rod_]

Good luck with that man.
By the way if you use it, add me in Skype as "Hernan Thiers" (Australia). Better to talk about Presta issues
See you!.

[TropischBruin]

and


Try these tips too when using Preatacart:

Enable and configure search friendly urls.
Use your alt tags every time you add images such as logos or category headers.
Don't use more then 16-20 meta tags per page.
Don't repeat links to the homepage or display links to the home page on your home page. (Google PR Rank Tip)
Repeat top 5 key words at least twice in a page when ever possible, however you should avoid duplicate sentences, and series of words.

Thats a great SEO foundation. And set up Google analytics on your site for sure! Its integrated into prestashop already, and it gives you better statistics about your site usage then even God has on your website, lol Seriously!

SEO-urls are highly overrated and the value of Tags has not been proofen yet.

Make sure that the description and meta-tags belonging to each product are unique and not overdone.
The use of H1 ect. tags in the source-code of your template is also something you can bennefit from (I know it changed a lot for my shop).

My own shop has no SEO-urls but all other items are in place and after doing so I went in Google from page 7 to page 1 and sometimes page 2.

[Paul C]

I think there needs to be a little bit of reality injected into this

Three or four keywords in the keyword meta-tag is more than enough. If you put lots in, then each ones value quickly approaches 0 (you're sharing any "credit" for them over a large number). Put too many in, and it's a simple case of keyword spamming and the page just gets a penalty. The keyword meta-tag is largely ignored by Google, but may be used by smaller search engines.

The description meta-tag gives very little additional credit to your page, although you should include one as this gives search engines a hint as to what to put under your listings in the SERPS if it can't find something better itself. Have a look in search results pages to see how much text they'll actually display in there

In my opinion SEO urls as a "magic solution" is a myth plain and simple, and if you get them wrong they can do more harm than good (by diluting page rank over multiple copies of pages, and poor indexing due to feeding search engines a potentially infinite set of urls to crawl). If your SEO urls don't respond with a 200 result for one url and one url only per "unique page", then it isn't helping you. Any "duplicate" forms of your urls must return a 301 to the correct form.

Paul

[adibranch]

i do a lot of SEO, particularly with e-commerce sites (its my job) and i have to say that prestashop is pretty good out of the box, providing you know what you're doing in the first place and dont over dilute your page. I've got a shop on test purely to see positions in the serps for various terms, and its no problem to get in the top 3 for minority terms without even thinking about it, on a new shop, on a new domain (once indexed).

I tested by using an obscure term 'monkey seeds' (yet over 2 million results) which was no1 instantly, and even a relatively competitive term jumped in at around 25. This is pretty good for a term and site which hasnt had any promotion whatsoever.

Anyway, SEO for e-commerce sites is much more difficult than regular SEO, but there are a few basic rules.. its basically all about theming.

- Theme your home page for the GENERIC term applied to your whole site, ie if you sell Garden Items, just focus the home page on terms like garden, gardening, gardening products, gardening supplier, garden tools etc. Dont mention if at all possible (especially in your metas) any of your products or product categories, and if you do, keep them to an absolute minimum. There is a legit reason for this, and its too much to go into (note that this only applies to an established shop, in the very beginning dont follow this rule).

- Theme each page for what its about, remove all mentions of anything else in the metas, and preferably the page content where possible. Your category page for 'garden spades' should only mention garden spades (and possibly one variant eg 'gardening spade') in its titles and metas. You should not be mentioning the different types of spade you sell on this page, but obviously they will appear in the copy, as links to your products. All links going to this garden spade page should be concentrating on those terms only.

Meta Description i'd purely have 'Garden Spades. We supply spades of all types for all your garden and gardening needs. Huge range of spades in Stock'. Good for search engines, and good for natural reading to the visitor should the description be listed in the index.Meta keywords, simply 'garden, gardening, spades, spade'. Thats it !!
Title would simply be 'Garden Spades | Garden Spade', possibly followed by a generic term eg ' : Mycompany gardening supplies', although this varies depending on current positions and product range.

- This is important : BLOCK DUPLICATES of pages, eg all those 'sort by price' eg need to be blocked from being indexed. You can do this by putting a wildcard block in place in the robots.txt file, read up on this if you dont know how to do it.

thats the basics for e-commerce sites... of course in realirty this is a tiny portion of what you actually need to do.

[Guest]

Thanks for your advice...

[ramblingrose]

i do a lot of SEO, particularly with e-commerce sites (its my job) and i have to say that prestashop is pretty good out of the box, providing you know what you're doing in the first place and dont over dilute your page. I've got a shop on test purely to see positions in the serps for various terms, and its no problem to get in the top 3 for minority terms without even thinking about it, on a new shop, on a new domain (once indexed).

I tested by using an obscure term 'monkey seeds' (yet over 2 million results) which was no1 instantly, and even a relatively competitive term jumped in at around 25. This is pretty good for a term and site which hasnt had any promotion whatsoever.

Anyway, SEO for e-commerce sites is much more difficult than regular SEO, but there are a few basic rules.. its basically all about theming.

- Theme your home page for the GENERIC term applied to your whole site, ie if you sell Garden Items, just focus the home page on terms like garden, gardening, gardening products, gardening supplier, garden tools etc. Dont mention if at all possible (especially in your metas) any of your products or product categories, and if you do, keep them to an absolute minimum. There is a legit reason for this, and its too much to go into (note that this only applies to an established shop, in the very beginning dont follow this rule).

- Theme each page for what its about, remove all mentions of anything else in the metas, and preferably the page content where possible. Your category page for 'garden spades' should only mention garden spades (and possibly one variant eg 'gardening spade') in its titles and metas. You should not be mentioning the different types of spade you sell on this page, but obviously they will appear in the copy, as links to your products. All links going to this garden spade page should be concentrating on those terms only.

Meta Description i'd purely have 'Garden Spades. We supply spades of all types for all your garden and gardening needs. Huge range of spades in Stock'. Good for search engines, and good for natural reading to the visitor should the description be listed in the index.Meta keywords, simply 'garden, gardening, spades, spade'. Thats it !!
Title would simply be 'Garden Spades | Garden Spade', possibly followed by a generic term eg ' : Mycompany gardening supplies', although this varies depending on current positions and product range.

- This is important : BLOCK DUPLICATES of pages, eg all those 'sort by price' eg need to be blocked from being indexed. You can do this by putting a wildcard block in place in the robots.txt file, read up on this if you dont know how to do it.

thats the basics for e-commerce sites... of course in realirty this is a tiny portion of what you actually need to do.

Thank you for the information!

[iYann]

Thank you guys for insightful info !

[Ann]

Hi guys !

What about the referencement in foreign language pages ?

I have more than 500 pages in Google , but only in one langage, the default one of my boutique . How can I change this and have my English pages translated by Google as well ?

Any tip ?

[iYann]

Hi Ann,

I know there's a sort of community driven site that offers translations like a service exchange. If you don't want to or can't participate they have very small fees for translating webpages into tons of languages.
I don't have the direct contact but my friend worked with them and had her site translated in 13 languages in a matter of a couple of weeks.
If you want the info, check her site at http://www.abrispas.com/index_en.html , click on contact and send her an e-mail mentioning my name. Her name is Agata.

Hope it helps,

Yann

[Ann]

Thanks a lot for your help, but this was not the purpose of my post . I was meaning changes in the prestashop script or whatever preventing the spiders to register properly my pages !

[Kaxis]

Thanks a lot for your help, but this was not the purpose of my post . I was meaning changes in the prestashop script or whatever preventing the spiders to register properly my pages !

Bonjour Ann


For this the URL should show the language ex.: &langue=en or &lang=en etc...
This way the search engine crawlers would identify to different pages!

Or like in your case an entirely different name!

BUT the next step is a sitemap.xml this file must reflect all your pages ! English and French etc...
The crawlers read this file and update there database.


Hope this helps,

Bonne journée

P.S. : whats this WEDOO.com popup ! not good at all for an e-commerce

[Ann]

Thanks a lot for your help, but this was not the purpose of my post . I was meaning changes in the prestashop script or whatever preventing the spiders to register properly my pages !

Bonjour Ann


For this the URL should show the language ex.: &langue=en or &lang=en etc...
This way the search engine crawlers would identify to different pages!

Or like in your case an entirely different name!

BUT the next step is a sitemap.xml this file must reflect all your pages ! English and French etc...
The crawlers read this file and update there database.


Hope this helps,

Bonne journée

thanks a lot

I already tried this, I have many site maps running with different solutions . So far It appears this is bug from Prestashop, not corrected yet

Ann

[Rod_]

-- Land Page --

Guys, did you think about to implement a different land page for your e-commerce website?. I heard that is a better practice to have a different index page, simple and attractive as your online shop entrance. This just to improve the Search Engine Opt.
So what I'm doing now is to install my presta site in a new folder under /www and then create a beautiful HTML+CSS index with enough text content where I put my main keywords and "Enter Link".

I guess that this could be much easier for Google to crawl than a huge dynamic web page and easier for you to put the ideal content to improve SEO isn't it?.
What do you think about this?.

[Ann]

-- Land Page --

Guys, did you think about to implement a different land page for your e-commerce website?. I heard that is a better practice to have a different index page, simple and attractive as your online shop entrance. This just to improve the Search Engine Opt.
So what I'm doing now is to install my presta site in a new folder under /www and then create a beautiful HTML+CSS index with enough text content where I put my main keywords and "Enter Link".

I guess that this could be much easier for Google to crawl than a huge dynamic web page and easier for you to put the ideal content to improve SEO isn't it?.
What do you think about this?.

The average internet customer hates not finding right away what he is looking for. The best way to gain a buy is to make him find his goal at first click. This is why a real referencement is necessary for every item.

[TropischBruin]

The average internet customer hates not finding right away what he is looking for. The best way to gain a buy is to make him find his goal at first click. This is why a real referencement is necessary for every item.

I disagree with that.

[Ann]

The average internet customer hates not finding right away what he is looking for. The best way to gain a buy is to make him find his goal at first click. This is why a real referencement is necessary for every item.

I disagree with that.

Quite fair enough ...! lol

[TropischBruin]

The average internet customer hates not finding right away what he is looking for. The best way to gain a buy is to make him find his goal at first click. This is why a real referencement is necessary for every item.

I disagree with that.

Quite fair enough ...! lol

I have a few landing-pages, their names are related to the products I sell.
Those names end up in Google on the first spot on the first page, when visited they get a sumery of the products and brands I sell in my shop and a link to get to my shop.
I get a lot of customers via those pages.

[iYann]

Hi,
...Need some help here...

Is it a normal Prestashop behavior that the meta keywords on all my category pages get reduced down to 128 characters... ?
When I enter less that 255 characters, then without a warning the source code ends up with the first 128 characters, cutting some keywords in 2.

This only affects the category pages though, I have no problems inputing 255 characters with the product pages and on the home page

Earlier in this thread, Ron_ suggested the following... Would you say it is a recommended method ?:

"Maybe you have to change the chars length of that field in the DB:
Go to table ps_product_lang and change the length of those meta fields from 255 to whatever you want. By the way I’m not sure if there could happen an error or something like that."

Or can I somehow edit the header in each page without messing with my shop ?

Thanks in advance,

Yann
working on www.afixamerica.com

[iYann]

By the way, I checked in my PhpMyAdmin and tried to figure out the table thing... I really don't want to mess anything but I think I saw a way to change the limit but I need some advice. Screenshot attached. What do you think ? Is it the right value to edit ?

[iYann]

Update:
I resolved it, found the answer in a french forum
I just put 255 in the meta keyword field of the ps_category_lang table
Wasn't so hard... lol

Tks,

Y

[Rod_]

The average internet customer hates not finding right away what he is looking for. The best way to gain a buy is to make him find his goal at first click. This is why a real referencement is necessary for every item.

I disagree with that.

Quite fair enough ...! lol

I have a few landing-pages, their names are related to the products I sell.
Those names end up in Google on the first spot on the first page, when visited they get a sumery of the products and brands I sell in my shop and a link to get to my shop.
I get a lot of customers via those pages.

Hi Tropisch,
Man very interesting point. Could be really interesting to see those land pages and online shop.
So, as I understood you have different html pages as land pages and each one linked to different categories, isn't it?.

[TropischBruin]

Hi Tropisch,
Man very interesting point. Could be really interesting to see those land pages and online shop.
So, as I understood you have different html pages as land pages and each one linked to different categories, isn't it?.

What I've done is registered some additional domains and put a html based site on it.
The visitor sees my logo and information about my shop and some links to the various category's in my shop.

[Rod_]

That should create a very good traffic, in fact I think that could help directly on your PR just by links sharing between your own different webs =)

[marcko]

Remember to put the sitemap in the robots.txt file

SITEMAP: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Works wonders

Paul

can you tell me where in that file are we supposed to insert the sitemap link?

[Torbz]

I have noticed that the SEO-friendly URL's break graphics and images on the page when used with the CMS infoblock fuction. this has got to do with the re-write fucntion - the CMS pages go to /content/1-name-of-CMS-page and in the process break header images and ad block images.

We sussed out that this is due to the /content/ folder placing, as the images exist above this folder in img/ but not yet sussed out how to fix all the broken graphics.

Any tips or if/when we solve it, we will post the solution.

[Mallee Boy]

Hi, can anyone tell me where the alt tags are in prestashop and how i can edit them?

Thanks,

David
Games from Everywhere

[nutbuster]

Remember to put the sitemap in the robots.txt file

SITEMAP: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Works wonders

Paul

Put the sitemap in the robots.txt file???

[Mallee Boy]

Meaning type the url of your sitemap into a line in your robots text. (bing, for example, will throw up an error when reading your robots.txt if the site map url is not there.)

[ladivito]

not understand.....can you please give us an example ? Thanks

[Mallee Boy]

Open your robots.txt file (its in your root directory) and on a new line at the bottom of the file simply type ALL the following:

Sitemap: http://www.gamesfromeverywhere.com.au/sitemap.xml

except don't use my URL, use yours. The url is for your sitemap (which you will also find in your root directory)

What you are doing is "pointing" to where your sitemap file is and allowing the search engines to crawl your site.

[Longhui Xiong]

I have a question, how to modify index meta name="keywords" & meta name="discription", in here includes prestashop information, I just want to modify my own information.

Who knows how to do it? Many thanks.

[airbag]

I do alot of SEO work for Magento and Zen Cart e-commerce stores.. and cant work out why the Prestashop SEO friendly URL's add in the category number into the URL. There seems to be no benefit in adding this in.

Does anybody have a hack to remove this so the URLs are cleaner?

[chineseboy]

hi every body!

I was just wondering how i would go about blocking duplicate pages? For example how would i block pages for 'sort by price'? Would this need to be done for every category?

Also how important is friendly url since it seems to cause alot of problems for many people?

[airbag]

Use the robots.txt file to do this.
# Files
Disallow: /addresses.php
Disallow: /address.php
Disallow: /authentication.php
Disallow: /cart.php
Disallow: /contact-form.php
Disallow: /discount.php
Disallow: /footer.php

etc etc.

[jozacg]

You might wanna copy the below to your robots.txt file

#Files
Disallow: /addresses.php
Disallow: /address.php
Disallow: /authentication.php
Disallow: /best-sales.php
Disallow: /cart.php
Disallow: /contact-form.php
Disallow: /discount.php
Disallow: /footer.php
Disallow: /get-file.php
Disallow: /header.php
Disallow: /history.php
Disallow: /identity.php
Disallow: /images.inc.php
Disallow: /init.php
Disallow: /my-account.php
Disallow: /order.php
Disallow: /order-slip.php
Disallow: /order-detail.php
Disallow: /order-follow.php
Disallow: /order-return.php
Disallow: /order-confirmation.php
Disallow: /pagination.php
Disallow: /password.php
Disallow: /pdf-invoice.php
Disallow: /pdf-order-return.php
Disallow: /pdf-order-slip.php
Disallow: /product-sort.php
Disallow: /search.php
Disallow: /statistics.php
Disallow: /zoom.php

Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com.com/sitemap.xml

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Allow: /

User-agent: Adsbot-Google
Allow: /

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /

User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Allow: /

#User-agent: ia_archiver-web.archive.org

#Disallow: /

[chineseboy]

So we're supposed to disallow the headers and footers? We don't want the search engines to index them?

[jozacg]

footer.php and header.php normally says to display the header.tpl and footer.tpl files respectively in your themes folder, this is what google bot fetches.

So both those .php files doesnt need to be indexed. but the the template files need to be.

[tomerg3]

So we're supposed to disallow the headers and footers? We don't want the search engines to index them?

They are not accessed directly ever, they are loaded from other files, so there is no reason for search engines to index the actual php file.

[sokpet]

Nice thread,

how about changing the image names in IMG product folder, so instead of 2-2 product.jpg you have 2-2"your product name".jpg. This can help for SEO.

[inveostore.com]

Search Engines don't care about image file names. They prefer ALT text and key-words around images. However, there are not many references about image indexing available, only few relevant:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/03/get-up-to-date-on-image-search.html
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/05/future-updates-for-google-image-search.html

A lot of SEO expect EXIF data will be included to relevance algorithm in the near future, because Peter Linsley, product manager for Google Images, said (you can see the video by visiting the first link):

I'm a huge EXIF fan, it makes perfect sense for the image itself to be able to carry pertinent metadata and we're always looking at ways it could be used especially as adoption rises over the coming years.

But at this time EXIF data seems to be still ignored by SE.

[inveostore.com]

The question is: how many users do you think is searching for "love station" (besides existing customers)?

[adibranch]

[inveostore.com]

[markanthony1986]

Have you guys used http://demo.lateralcode.com/jmerge/ ?? It combines all the JavaScipt files it finds linking from your header and combines them all in to one file.

I used it on a Wordpress site with great success

I also love to take up all the white space from the code and remove any comments tags.....

Hope this helps.

[Paul C]

@taurasmark That facility is available in 1.4 - minification, combination and serving from multiple "cdn" hosts

Paul

[ChrlS]

Nice thread!

[anilpatel]

Hi,

 

We are running an eCommerce website www.moglix.com  (dealing in Industrial, commercial & home use tools, products & equipment) which is built on Prestashop.

Recently we received an email stating that Google's new algorithm dropping the organic ranking of your website because it is built in PrestaShop.
We did some research on Google's update at that time span, but don't see any update that can impact of websites which are built in PrestaShop.

And also our organic rank is also stable even increasing day by day.

but our management is a little bit curious about this mail.

So wanted to know that is it true or just rumors?
Do any one have faced such issue?

Does Google have any special policy for PrestaShop websites?

Kindly help.

Edited March 4, 2017 by anilpatel (see edit history)