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Improving product pages

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Optimize the product page title

The meta title tag - the title of the page displayed in the top frame of your browser - is very important for the visibility of your store, both for search engines and for Internet users reading the search results. Each meta title tag must be unique in your store, and the display is limited to 70 characters, so make the most of this precious space by optimizing it.

Use keywords in product names

Since product names will be used at least in h1, and even (this is the default behavior of PrestaShop) in the title andurl, try to give your products names that are also key expressions typed in by web users. If you have a choice between two synonyms, choose those with the highest search volumes.

Describe the product in the best possible way

The (long) description of your product is primarily commercial in nature. This is what sells your product to the visitor. Many e-tailers fail to clearly describe their offer. From a SEO point of view, here are the requirements: no copying and pasting! Your description must be unique both on and off your site. Otherwise you risk a duplicate content penalty, which means that Google will ignore your page. I recommend a minimum of 300 words (with subjects, verbs and complements, not just a series of technical data like composition). If you lack inspiration, think about describing the product, its use, its advantages, its limitations, its variants, the brand, anecdotes, etc. If you have enough inspiration, don't hesitate to use h2 tags to structure your description and introduce a few keywords in passing! Within these descriptions, you can also add links to pages of informative content related to the product.

Avoid changing product urls

In PrestaShop, changing the product name does not change the simplified url. You can regenerate the simplified url, but you mustn't: the old url would then be in error 404 ! Use only if your product has changed radically.

Fill in image alt tags

Unpleasantly, PrestaShop won't let us update an alt tag on an image that's already in place. This must be done when the image is integrated, by filling in the "caption" field. If you need to do it again, click on the image to open a window on the left of the images, where you can enter the caption for the selected photo.

Fill in the meta description tag correctly

If you leave it blank, it will be taken from the short description. If you've got time to spare, you can rewrite the whole thing, respecting the principles we've already discussed: no more than 160 characters, commercially attractive and different from one page to the next. My advice is to keep your descriptions short and to the point. You kill two birds with one stone.

Optimize the h1 title

By default, and in the vast majority of cases, the title h1 will be the product name. This is a good thing, as it would cost too much to improve. If you felt like it, you could remove the h1 from the product name and place it by hand in the long description. Useless and time-consuming!

Evitez excess tags

Tags are keywords you associate with your products to give visitors a new way of searching for what they want. It's rarely used, and very time-consuming to set up (you have to do it for every product, and be very careful...). In terms of SEO, it's not very profitable, so you don't need to worry about it. The risk is to end up with over-optimization, as keyword clouds have been widely abused in the past.

Include a specific description for export to marketplaces

The idea is not to generate duplicate content of your texts on other sites, which are often very well referenced (Amazon, Fnac, RueDuCommerce...). The simplest solution is to send only the short description in your feed, not the long one. For the latter, you can simply use the one supplied by the product supplier.

Archive products in phase out

A "phase-out" product is one that will no longer be available for sale. The e-merchant's (normal) reflex is to deactivate it in the back office, or even delete it. Both are bad solutions. You're creating 404 (a bad signal SEO for your store PrestaShop) and throwing away useful content (if you've respected the SEO optimizations recommended above). Archiving means leaving the product accessible to the engine, but making it more difficult to access atinternaute. To do this, create an archive category in your PrestaShopstore. As soon as a product is no longer available, you take it out of all the categories it was in before, and put it only in the archive category (or sub-categories of this one, if you like tidying things up!). catégorie archive must not be accessible from the site menu. Try putting a discreet link to it from the footer to improve its indexing by Google, but you can also just include its path in sitemap.

Having done this, the work is not over. You should consider setting up a pop-up (use an Addon) to inform a visitor who would enter directly via this page that the product is no longer available for sale (to avoid a bounce) and suggest that they click on an alternative. Evitez a meta refresh or automatic redirect that would be perceived as "cloaking" by Google (a prohibited technique). Alternatives are a link to the category or a substitute product. Over time, the size of your site will increase without necessarily requiring a larger warehouse!

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