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How to do Search Engine Optimisation in Odoo

How is SEO handled in Odoo?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of good practices to optimize your website so that you get a better ranking in search engines like Google. In short, a good SEO allows you to get more visitors.

Some examples of SEO rules: your web pages should load faster, your page should have one and only one title <h1>, your website should have a /sitemap.xml file, etc.

The Odoo Website Builder is probably the most SEO-ready CMS out there. We consider SEO a top priority. To guarantee Odoo Website and Odoo eCommerce users have a great SEO, Odoo abstracts all the technical complexities of SEO and handles everything for you, in the best possible way.

Page speed

Introduction

The time to load a page is an important criteria for Google. A faster website not only improves your visitor's experience, but Google gives you a better page ranking if your page loads faster than your competitors. 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:

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 9 is bootstrap 3. Although a theme might use another framework, most of Odoo themes extend and customize bootstrap directly. Since Odoo supports Less and Sass, so you can modify CSS rules, instead of overwriting them through extra CSS lines, resulting in a smaller file.

Both files in the <head>What the visitor gets (only one file)
/* From bootstrap.css */.text-muted {
.text-muted {color: #666;
color: #777;background: yellow
background: yellow;}
}
/* From my-theme.css */
.text-muted {
color: #666;
}

Concatenated: every module or library you might use in Odoo has its own set of CSS, Less or Sass files (eCommerce, blog, theme, 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 that are 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.

Before minificationAfter minification
/* some comments */.text-muted {color: #666}
.text-muted {
color: #666;
}

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

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

Images

When you upload new images using the website builder, 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.

When you click on this link, the following window will appear:

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.

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:

HTML Pages

The HTML pages can be compressed, but this is usually handled by your web server (NGINX or Apache).

The Odoo Website builder has been optimized to guarantee clean and short HTML code. Building blocks have been developed to produce clean HTML code, usually using bootstrap and the HTML editor.

As an example, if you use the color picker to change the color of a paragraph to the primary color of your website, Odoo will produce the following code:

<p class="text-primary">My Text</p>

Whereas most HTML editors (such as CKEditor) will produce the following code:

<p style="color: #AB0201">My Text</p>

Responsive Design

As of 2015, websites that are not mobile-friendly are negatively impacted in Google Page ranking. All Odoo themes rely on Bootstrap 3 to render efficiently according to the device: desktop, tablet or mobile phone.

As all Odoo modules share the same technology, absolutely all pages in your website are mobile friendly. (as opposed to traditional CMS which have mobile friendly themes, but some specific modules or pages are not designed to be mobile friendly as they all have their own CSS frameworks)

Browser caching

Javascript, images and CSS resources have an URL that changes dynamically when their content change. As an example, all CSS files are loaded through this URL: http://localhost:8069/web/content/457-0da1d9d/web.assets_common.0.css. The 457-0da1d9d part of this URL will change if you modify the CSS of your website.

This allows Odoo to set a very long cache delay (XXX) on these resources: XXX secs, while being updated instantly if you update the resource.

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.

Here is the slide that summarizes the scalability of Odoo eCommerce and Odoo CMS. (based on Odoo version 8, Odoo 9 is even faster)

URLs handling

URLs Structure

A typical Odoo URL will look like this:

https://www.mysite.com/fr_FR/shop/product/my-great-product-31

With the following components:

  • https:// = Protocol
  • www.mysite.com = your domain name
  • /fr_FR = the language of the page. This part of the URL is removed if the visitor browses the main language of the website (english by default, but you can set another language as the main one). Thus, the English version of this page is: https://www.mysite.com/shop/product/my-great-product-31
  • /shop/product = every module defines its own namespace (/shop is for the catalog of the eCommerce module, /shop/product is for a product page). This name can not be customized to avoid conflicts in different URLs.
  • my-great-product = by default, this is the slugified title of the product this page refers to. But you can customize it for SEO purposes. A product named "Pain carré" will be slugified to "pain-carre". Depending on the namespace, this could be different objects (blog post, page title, forum post, forum comment, product category, etc)
  • -31 = the unique ID of the product

Note that any dynamic component of an URL can be reduced to its ID. As an example, the following URLs all do a 301 redirect to the above URL:

This could be useful to easily get shorter version of an URL and handle efficiently 301 redirects when the name of your product changes over time.

Some URLs have several dynamic parts, like this one (a blog category and a post):

In the above example:

  • Company News: is the title of the blog
  • The Odoo Story: is the title of a specific blog post

When an Odoo page has a pager, the page number is set directly in the URL (does not have a GET argument). This allows every page to be indexed by search engines. Example:

Changes in URLs & Titles

When the URL of a page changes (e.g. a more SEO friendly version of your product name), you don't have to worry about updating all links:

  • Odoo will automatically update all its links to the new URL
  • If external websites still points to the old URL, a 301 redirect will be done to route visitors to the new website

As an example, this URL:

Will automatically redirect to :

In short, just change the title of a blog post or the name of a product, and the changes will apply automatically everywhere in your website. The old link still works for links coming from external website. (with a 301 redirect to not lose the SEO link juice)

HTTPS

As of August 2014, Google started to add a ranking boost to secure HTTPS/SSL websites. So, by default all Odoo Online instances are fully based on HTTPS. If the visitor accesses your website through a non HTTPS url, it gets a 301 redirect to its HTTPS equivalent.

Multi-language support

Multi-language URLs

If you run a website in multiple languages, the same content will be available in different URLs, depending on the language used:

In this example, fr_FR is the language of the page. You can even have several variations of the same language: pt_BR (Portuguese from Brazil) , pt_PT (Portuguese from Portugal).

Language annotation

To tell Google that the second URL is the French translation of the first URL, Odoo will add an HTML link element in the header. In the HTML <head> section of the English version, Odoo automatically adds a link element pointing to the other versions of that webpage;

With this approach:

  • Google knows the different translated versions of your page and will propose the right one according to the language of the visitor searching on Google
  • You do not get penalized by Google if your page is not translated yet, since it is not a duplicated content, but a different version of the same content.

Language detection

When a visitor lands for the first time at your website (e.g. yourwebsite.com/shop), his may automatically be redirected to a translated version according to his browser language preference: (e.g. yourwebsite.com/fr_FR/shop).

Odoo redirects visitors to their prefered language only the first time visitors land at your website. After that, it keeps a cookie of the current language to avoid any redirection.

To force a visitor to stick to the default language, you can use the code of the default language in your link, example: yourwebsite.com/en_US/shop. This will always land visitors to the English version of the page, without using the browser language preferences.

Meta Tags

Titles, Keywords and Description

Every web page should define the <title>, <description> and <keywords> meta data. These information elements are used by search engines to rank and categorize your website according to a specific search query. So, it is important to have titles and keywords in line with what people search in Google.

In order to write quality meta tags, that will boost traffic to your website, Odoo provides a Promote tool, in the top bar of the website builder. This tool will contact Google to give you information about your keywords and do the matching with titles and contents in your page.

In terms of SEO, content is king. Thus, blogs play an important role in your content strategy. In order to help you optimize all your blog post, Odoo provides a page that allows you to quickly scan the meta tags of all your blog posts.

Sitemap

Odoo will generate a /sitemap.xml file automatically for you. For performance reasons, this file is cached and updated every 12 hours.

By default, all URLs will be in a single /sitemap.xml file, but if you have a lot of pages, Odoo will automatically create a Sitemap Index file, respecting the sitemaps.org protocol grouping sitemap URL's in 45000 chunks per file.

Every sitemap entry has 4 attributes that are computed automatically:

  • <loc> : the URL of a page
  • <lastmod> : last modification date of the resource, computed automatically based on related object. For a page related to a product, this could be the last modification date of the product or the page
  • <priority> : modules may implement their own priority algorithm based on their content (example: a forum might assign a priority based on the number of votes on a specific post). The priority of a static page is defined by it's priority field, which is normalized. (16 is the default)

Structured Data Markup

Structured Data Markup is used to generate Rich Snippets in search engine results. It is a way for website owners to send structured data to search engine robots; helping them to understand your content and create well-presented search results.

Google supports a number of rich snippets for content types, including: Reviews, People, Products, Businesses, Events and Organizations.

Odoo implements micro data as defined in the schema.org specification for events, eCommerce products, forum posts and contact addresses. This allows your product pages to be displayed in Google using extra information like the price and rating of a product:

robots.txt

Odoo automatically creates a /robots.txt file for your website. Its content is:

User-agent: *

Sitemap: https://www.odoo.com/sitemap.xml

Content is king

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

Social Features

Twitter Cards

Odoo does not implement twitter cards yet. It will be done for the next version.

Social Network

Odoo allows to link all your social network accounts in your website. All you have to do is to refer all your accounts in the Settings menu of the Website Admin application.

Test Your Website

You can compare how your website rank, in terms of SEO, against Odoo using WooRank free services: https://www.woorank.com