PrestaShop SEO and URLs management

Search Engine Optimization is quite important these days. Luckily, PrestaShop provides a variety of options to improve your website’s SEO. You may review them by navigating to the Shop Parameters menu > Traffic & SEO.

In the SEO & URLs tab, you would notice a few sections and we will discuss each of them separately.

The first one is named SEO & URLs. In that section, you may edit each page’s URL separately by clicking on Edit next to it. A new screen with editing options would appear. You would be able to change the Page Name, Page Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords, and the Rewritten URL.

A few tips:

• Page – The drop-down list gives you all the pages that can benefit from a friendly URL;
• Page title – The title that will appear in search engines when a request is made;
• Meta description – A presentation of the page in just a few words. It will appear in search results;
• Meta Keywords – Keywords that you must define to have your site referenced by search engines. You can enter several of them: type the words, press the Return key, and see how the tag gets encapsulated in a yellow block, with a tiny cross icon to delete it;
• Rewritten URL – This is where you set the friendly URL. Make it short and descriptive, use only letters and numbers, and replace spaces (” “) by hyphens (“-“).

The section under SEO and URLs is named Set Up URLs.

This is a quite helpful section as it allows you to set up Friendly URLs with just the toggle of a button. You may also enable Accented URLs if you want to use non-Latin characters in your URLs. In this section, PrestaShop allows you to choose if you want to use Redirects to the canonical URL and which HTTP redirect status to be used (Temporary or Permanent). In this section, you may also enable/disable the Apache’s Multiviews option (use it when you have issues with URL rewriting, links requests for non-existing URLs to the closest URL) and mod_security module.

Scrolling down would lead you to the next section called Set Shop URL. As explained in the section’s name, here you may update and alter the domain used by your PrestaShop application and the folder in which it resides.

The last section is the Robots File Generation. Clicking on the Generate a robots.txt file button would automatically add a robots.txt file with exclusion directives for files and directories that are not meant to be public, and should not be indexed.