Making ZenCart SEO Friendly

[NathanielB]

Hi, so to carry on with my other thread, I asked for some advice on which shopping carts are good to use, but I didnt get on so well with Joomla for my needs and if I go with Zen Cart I dont need to play around with the cvs files to import the products from my suppliers.

Now thats the intro out the way... What free tools/modules would you use in order to make Zen Cart as SEO friendly as possible?

For SEO friendly URL's I tried CEON, but it didnt work (404 on all the pages), so I am after a good but free module for this in order to change my URLs to /category/product rather then /index.php?xyz etc

Also I need to sort out the page titles, so if anyone knows of a module for this that would be great, if not a hand on which file's' I need to edit will be fine. I have, or rather still am making my own template, so I dont know if that makes a difference as to which file's' I edit?

Last minute thoughts:
Is there a way to auto ping my products to google shopping?
Have I missed anything out to help make the site more SEO friendly?

[NathanielB]

Bump'edy, bump, bump!

Anyone able to help me with this please? I cant believe no one here knows of a good seo plugin or tools etc that work well for zencart?!

I would like free tools, but am happy to pay if thats not possible, so please fire away with some suggestions for seo plugins etc for fixing zencart url's, titles and so on

[philmorris]

Bump'edy, bump, bump!

Anyone able to help me with this please? I cant believe no one here knows of a good seo plugin or tools etc that work well for zencart?!

I would like free tools, but am happy to pay if thats not possible, so please fire away with some suggestions for seo plugins etc for fixing zencart url's, titles and so on

Hi NathanialB

i have been doing some simple SEO with zencart and find it very annoying to make it really good at SEO.

but some simple SEO modules you can try is Ultimate SEO please see link below.
www(DOT)zen-cart(DOT)com/index.php?main_page=product_contrib_info&products_ id=231

this works well apart from if you run a hiarachy style navigation it falls over at lvl3. I.e. (home -> catagory > product) works but (home -> Brand -> catagory > product) has seo friendly URLS untill the product page where it then defaults back to php style linking.

In regards to the title tags, the only one i can find is a plugin for accessing the meta tags of the ez pages but that is all.

all other meta tags are accessable under the product/ catagory menu.

when choosing the title i find it it best to remove all the catagories and price references and just have your product name. this will keep your title short and will increase your chance of exact matches.


Modifying the tag line is the best way i have found for SEO, if you remove the title and set only the tagline as your brand name then you will not have duplicate titles in the SERPS

to do this:

Find: define('TITLE', 'Zen Cart!'); and change Zen Cart! to your store name. Do not remove the opening and closing single quotes.

Find: define('SITE_TAGLINE', 'The Art of E-commerce'); and change The Art of E-commerce to the tagline you would like to use. Do not remove the opening and closing single quotes.

Save the file and upload to: includes/languages/english/YOUR_TEMPLATE/meta_tags.php


hope this helps

Phil Morris

[philmorris]

Last minute thoughts:
Is there a way to auto ping my products to google shopping?
Have I missed anything out to help make the site more SEO friendly?

There is a google merchant module but it only pings it on the month that you install it, every consecutive month it errors as in the .xml the expiory date does not up date so your newly compiled .xml product listing is instantly void as the expiorydate is old.

best way i could do this was download a copy monthly and do a find/replace on the date for a date that is 30days in advance.

Phil Morris