How to do Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in Odoo

Meta Tags

Title, Description

Every web page should define the <title> and <description> meta data. These information elements are used by search engines to promote your website. They are automatically generated based on page title & content, but you can finetune them. Make sure they fit the content of the page, otherwise you will be downgraded by search engines.

Keywords

In order to write quality content and boost your traffic, Odoo provides a <keyword> finder. Those keywords are the searches you want to head towards your website. For each keyword, you see how it is used in the content (H1, H2, page title, page description, page content) and what are the related searches in Google. The more keywords are used the better.

Content is King

When it comes to SEO, content is usually king. Odoo provides several modules to help you build your website content:

• Odoo Blogs: write great contents.

• Odoo Slides: publish all your Powerpoint or PDF presentations. Their content is automatically indexed on the web page. Example: odoo.com/slides/public-channel-1

• Odoo Forum: let your community create contents for you. Example: odoo.com/forum/1 (accounts for 30% of Odoo.com landing pages)

• Odoo Mailing List Archive: publish mailing list archives on your website. Example: odoo.com/groups/community-59 (1000 pages created per month)

Use Social Networks

Social media is built for mass sharing. If lots of people share your content on social media, then it’s likely more people will link to it, and links are a huge factor for SEO ranking.

Odoo embeds several tools to share content through social media:

Social Network

Odoo allows to link all your social network accounts in your website footer. All you have to do is to refer all your accounts in your company settings.

Social Share

Drop the building block Share on any page you want your visitors to share. By clicking the icon, they are prompted to share the page in their social media wall.

Most social media use a picture of the picture to decorate the share post. Odoo uses the website logo by default but you can choose any other image of your page in the Promote tool.

Multi-Language Support

Introduction

The time to load a page is an important criteria for search engines. A faster website not only improves your visitor’s experience, but gives you a better page ranking. Some studies have shown that, if you divide the time to load your pages by two (e.g. 2 seconds instead of 4 seconds), the visitor abandonment rate is also divided by two. (25% to 12.5%). One extra second to load a page could cost $1.6b to Amazon in sales.

Fortunately, Odoo does all the magic for you. Below, you will find the tricks Odoo uses to speed up your page loading time. You can compare how your website ranks using these two tools:

• Google Page Speed

• Pingdom Website Speed Test

Images

When you upload new images, Odoo automatically compresses them to reduce their sizes (lossless compression for .PNG and .GIF and lossy compression for .JPG).

From the upload button, you have the option to keep the original image unmodified if you prefer to optimize the quality of the image rather than performance.

When you click on an image, Odoo shows you the Alt and title attributes of the <img> tag. You can click on it to set your own title and Alt attributes for the image.

Odoo’s pictograms are implemented using a font (Font Awesome in most Odoo themes). Thus, you can use as many pictograms as you want in your page, they will not result in extra requests to load the page.

Static Resources: CSS

All CSS files are pre-processed, concatenated, minified, compressed and cached (server-side and browser-side). The result:

• only one CSS file request is needed to load a page

• this CSS file is shared and cached amongst pages, so that when the visitor clicks on another page, the browser doesn’t have to even load a single CSS resource.

• this CSS file is optimized to be small

Pre-processed: The CSS framework used by Odoo is Bootstrap. Although a theme might use another framework, most of Odoo themes extend and customize Bootstrap directly. Since Odoo supports Less and Sass, you can modify CSS rules instead of overwriting them through extra CSS lines, resulting in a smaller file.

Concatenated: every module or library you might use in Odoo has its own set of CSS, Less or Sass files (eCommerce, blogs, themes, etc.). Having several CSS files is great for the modularity, but not good for the performance because most browsers can only perform 6 requests in parallel resulting in lots of files loaded in series. The latency time to transfer a file is usually much longer than the actual data transfer time, for small files like .JS and .CSS. Thus, the time to load CSS resources depends more on the number of requests to be done than the actual file size.

To address this issue, all CSS / Less / Sass files are concatenated into a single .CSS file to send to the browser. So a visitor has only one .CSS file to load per page, which is particularly efficient. As the CSS is shared amongst all pages, when the visitor clicks on another page, the browser does not even have to load a new CSS file!

The CSS sent by Odoo includes all CSS / Less / Sass of all pages / modules. By doing this, additional page views from the same visitor will not have to load CSS files at all. But some modules might include huge CSS/Javascript resources that you do not want to prefetch at the first page because they are too big. In this case, Odoo splits this resource into a second bundle that is loaded only when the page using it is requested. An example of this is the backend that is only loaded when the visitor logs in and accesses the backend (/web).

Minified: After being pre-processed and concatenated, the resulting CSS is minified to reduce its size.

The final result is then compressed, before being delivered to the browser.

Then, a cached version is stored server-side (so we do not have to pre-process, concatenate, minify at every request) and browser-side (so the same visitor will load the CSS only once for all pages they visit).

Static Resources: Javascript

As with CSS resources, Javascript resources are also concatenated, minified, compressed and cached (server-side and browser-side).

Odoo creates three Javascript bundles:

• One for all pages of the website (including code for parallax effects, form validation, etc.)

• One for common Javascript code shared among frontend and backend (Bootstrap)

• One for backend specific Javascript code (Odoo Web Client interface for your employees using Odoo)

Most visitors of your website will only need the first two bundles, resulting in a maximum of two Javascript files to load to render one page. As these files are shared across all pages, further clicks by the same visitor will not load any other Javascript resource.

CDN

If you activate the CDN feature in Odoo, static resources (Javascript, CSS, images) are loaded from a Content Delivery Network. Using a Content Delivery Network has three advantages:

• Load resources from a nearby server (most CDN have servers in main countries around the globe)

• Cache resources efficiently (no computation resources usage on your own server)

• Split the resource loading on different services allowing to load more resources in parallel (since the Chrome limit of 6 parallel requests is by domain)

You can configure your CDN options from the Website Admin app, using the Configuration menu. Here is an example of configuration you can use:

Responsive Design

Websites that are not mobile-friendly are negatively impacted in search engine rankings. All Odoo themes rely on Bootstrap to render efficiently according to the device: desktop, tablet or mobile.

As all Odoo modules share the same technology, absolutely all pages in your website are mobile friendly.

Scalability

In addition to being fast, Odoo is also more scalable than traditional CMS and eCommerce (Drupal, Wordpress, Magento, Prestashop). The following link provides an analysis of the major open source CMS and eCommerce compared to Odoo when it comes to high query volumes: https://www.odoo.com/slides/slide/197

Here is the slide that summarizes the scalability of Odoo Website & eCommerce.