Search engines are a significant source of traffic for all websites. Depending on your line of business and proper positioning of your site on search engines, these tools can generate more than half of your traffic!
Going further into the state of the market for search engines, the AT Internet Institute (XITI) barometer puts Google in first place in terms of providing traffic on these aides. With over 91% of traffic, Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, is in second place, with only 2% market share. It suffices to say that cutting yourself off from Google means losing a tremendous visibility with an audience of search engine-consuming internet users.
When it comes to SEO, it is necessary to distinguish between referencing and positioning. Referencing means that your site will appear in search engines, which is not always the case by default. Positioning, meanwhile, is optimizing the site so that it appears in the opening pages of results when a user enters a keyword into the search engine.
We can also compare natural SEO to paid positioning (buying keywords). Natural SEO is using a technique to be referenced and well positioned on queries, while the paid positioning or buying search keywords is a question of budgeting for being well placed on search engine results, as the case with Google Adwords, the “star” system for buying search engine keywords.
How to be Well-Positioned on Search Engines
Google has always been the search engine that best meets the needs of users searching the internet. We must therefore show Google that your site is the best match for target keywords.
For this, the SEO Expert module developed by PrestaShop helps you make product pages that are 100% search engine friendly, meaning they make use of SEO opportunities offered by the title tags (representing the title of the page in question, not the one displayed on the page itself, but one you see at the top of your browser when viewing the actual page), Keywords (to associate keywords to a page), description (to describe what is in page), and rewriting URLs (Url_rewrite), which will make the URLs of your pages more “natural”, meaning that they will contain key words rather than parameters that don’t interest search engines.
Why is it Important to Use Keywords?
To be well-positioned in Google, you must fulfill specific requirements. The recipe to being positioned well on Google is secret—nobody knows what it is--but it uses so many settings that accumulating even a few of them will help you be better positioned.
What are the correct settings?
They are generally based on relevance—or lack thereof—of content displayed on a web page: If the title of your page matches the page content, if the URL rewriting displays relevant keywords, if the images have descriptions, etc., then the overall sum of these "good" items will make you potentially more likely to be better positioned on a keyword than a competitor who didn’t do the same thing.
For example: you sell shirts with a mandarin collar, so one of the right keywords to describe your products can be "mandarin collar shirt." This keyword must therefore be present in the product page’s URL, the title, the description and the keywords of the page. By extension, the link that will point to this page must have the wording "mandarin collar shirt".
How to Choose Keywords?
There are a multitude of answers to the question “How should I choose my keywords?”, but in the case of e-commerce sites, your best keywords are those that characterize the products you sell. However, it’s hard to find a balance: you must be fairly general, but not too general. Do not choose target keywords with product names that are too technical or that the average individual will never think of. To determine your keywords you should put yourself in place of the consumer: What would you look for first in order to find this product? What keywords would you type into Google?
Other factors are taken into account in order to be well positioned on keywords or simply to guide the search engine toward your e-commerce site’s product pages. For example, there is the Smart Sitemap module that will automatically generate a Sitemap file listing the pages of your site that the search engine can index. Another module, Research Cloud, sends you a page that automatically lists the keywords most frequently typed to find your store, which will create new opportunities for content and links.