PrestaShop 1.6.1.1 SEO Tips – Make Your PrestaShop Store SEO Friendly
Every web site which has a business, should think about Search Engine Optimization-trying to get your site in first page of Google, Yahoo and Bing search result pages. When your web site reaches to more people, it will be popular and it will make more profit. There are many different ways to get listed in the popular search engines. The following tips help you to increase the ranking of a website.
Use proper Title and Meta Tags
Most popular search engine’s crawlers title tag and meta tag description. Title should describe your page content. And in the meta tag description keywords should be included in precise manner. The keywords should be relevant to the content. To insert keywords, go to your “Back Office >> Preferences >> Meta-Tag“. There will be index.php, click to edit. Enter you page title, meta description and meta keywords, but do not forget to use relevant keywords which best describe your website.
Make Sure You’re on the Right Type of Server
This is the first step for a reason. It’s important.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if you are using an IIS (Windows) server to host your PrestaShop website, you are going to get so frustrated that your Mac may end up at the bottom of a swimming pool. (This may or may not have happened)
The reason I say this is that URL rewriting just never seems to gel well with any rewrite module that IIS can use. Rewrite modules are also a nightmare to get set up if you are using a shared hosting account. I’ve also, on occasion, had issues with the installation and configuration of Joomla! on an IIS server.
For practicality and succinctness’s sake, I would simply recommend that you save yourself endless headaches and get your PrestaShop site set up on an Apache server with mod_rewrite installed. Your nerves and the SEO components you’re going to install will thank you. If you want to use Apache Servers, you can count on ASPHostPortal‘s unique handmade hosting solution. They use the latest Apache Servers version with a custom set of modules for more speed and security. They guarantee that their Apache Servers are regularly updated and perfectly secured, and your website will be safer, faster and better supported than anywhere else!
Remove Dead Links
If there are any links inside the website that is not working then that should be removed immediately because those dead links give negative impact to the crawlers when they do not find the pages that are shown in the link. To find out dead links in your website, you may usegoogle webmaster tool. It will automatically find dead links.
Use One Default URL
If you use both of “www.site-name.com” and “site-name.com“, disable one them. Because search engines crawlers think that they are two different independent site. As a result, there will be duplicate titles and content, which will negatively effect your site ranking. As a solution, you may redirect one URL to another. If you do not know how to do it from control panel, you may use .htaccess file.
Use URL With Keywords
To get indexed in search engines is to use URL name with the keywords not with numbers. For example:use like that “www.prestashopic.com/best_places_to_learn_about_prestashop” not like that “www.prestashopic.com/200032.html”. This increases the probability of getting caught by the crawlers. To use friendly URL, go to the “Back Office >> Preferences“ and click to “yes”. But before this you have to generate a .htaccess file.
Prevent URL Duplication
When you turn on friendly URL, some of URL may not be changed and may still work. Many search engines have filters in place to remove the duplicate listings – this keeps their search results clean, and is overall a good feature. Prestashop can not handle with duplicate URL well. To handle this problem, you may use “Duplicate URL Redirect” module, and you may get more information from module developer.
Sitemap Generator XML
Sitemaps are at the heart of Search Engine Friendly Design. They make it very quick and easy for the search engines to find and index every page on your web site by putting links to every page in one spot. Xml sitemaps are used to design the sitemaps mainly focusing for submission to the search engines. To create a sitemap for Google search engine, you may use “Google Sitemap Generator” for free . This module creates a Google sitemap with a current URLs for multiple languages.
Use Social Media
To get better ranking in search engines do not forget about social networking sites. The most popular sites are facebook, twitter, stumbleupon, dig, reddit etc. By using these social medias, they give more exposure to the site to the different online communities and helps in getting reference. There are many free modules like “Sexy Bookmarks“, “CoolShare“, “Block Social Bookmark” which may help you to add social media links to you prestashop store.