The Disappearance of the Meta Keywords Field in PrestaShop 1.7 and the Importance of Meta Tags for SEO

Introduction

The disappearance of the Meta Keywords field in PrestaShop 1.7 is an important topic for e-commerce website owners. Meta Keywords are an HTML tag used to provide information about relevant keywords for the page content. This has been an important factor in ranking website pages on search engines. However, in version 1.7 of PrestaShop, this feature has been removed.

Why Was This Feature Removed?

Meta Keywords are often abused by webmasters trying to manipulate search engines using irrelevant keywords. As a result, Google and other search engines have stopped using them as a significant ranking factor. Moreover, most indexing robots can now determine relevant keywords simply based on the page content.

The Importance of Meta Tags for SEO

Although Meta Keywords are no longer a significant ranking factor, it is still important to include relevant keywords in the Meta Description and Meta Title tags. These tags help search engines understand the page content and display relevant snippets in search results.

Additionally, using H2 and H3 tags can also help with SEO by structuring the page content and helping search engines understand the page organization. It is important to choose relevant titles for H2 and H3 tags and use them appropriately in the page hierarchy.

Tip to Fill the Meta Keywords Field in PrestaShop 1.7

Despite the removal of Meta Keywords, there is a simple trick to fill this tag in the PrestaShop 1.7 database. This involves using the "tags" feature of PrestaShop to concatenate the tags together and fill the Meta Keywords field in the database.

Here is the SQL query to use to fill the Meta Keywords field in the PrestaShop 1.7 database with the tags:

UPDATE ps_product_lang pl SET pl.meta_keywords = (
SELECT GROUP_CONCAT(t.name ORDER BY t.name ASC SEPARATOR ', ') from ps_tag t 
left join ps_product_tag pt on pt.id_tag = t.id_tag
where pt.id_product = pl.id_product AND t.id_lang = pl.id_lang ) WHERE pl.meta_keywords = ''

This query updates the ps_product_lang table and concatenates the tags for each product into the meta_keywords column. The tags are retrieved from the ps_tag table and filtered for each product based on the product ID in the ps_product_tag table.

In conclusion, the removal of the Meta Keywords field in PrestaShop 1.7 does not have a major impact on your site's page ranking. However, it is still important to fill in the Meta Description and Meta Title tags with relevant keywords. If you wish to fill in the Meta Keywords field in the database, you can use the SQL query presented above to concatenate the tags from the "tags" feature of PrestaShop.