osCommerce Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization, commonly referred to as SEO, is one of the hottest topics currently on the Internet. It refers to optimizing your site so that the search engines will rank you higher in their index of sites. Ranking high on these lists is one of the best ways to increase traffic to your site.

The next step is to integrate your keywords and key phrases into your normal product descriptions. Once you have the page content right, you then have a base to apply other optimisation techniques such as Meta tags, session IDs, a site map and inbound links.

1. Meta Tags - Meta tags alone will not give you a high search engine ranking but a coordinated effort to integrate your Meta tags to the content of the page and to your products can improve significantly your search engine ranking for relevant keywords or key phrases.
   Meta Tags (also known as Header Tags Controller contribution) allows set unique Header Tags for: Title, Keywords, Description on a per page basis.\
2. Search Engine Friendly URLs (Ultimate SEO URLs contribution) - This feature replaces the stock osCommerce method of creating URLs by passing the parameters (products_id, cPath, etc.) by creating static HTML file URLs. Having your main keywords in the URL for each product and category page can significantly help your search engine rankings. Search Engine Friendly URLs use a server feature called mod_rewrite to rewrite the URL so that the outside world sees only the URL generated by the database from the product name and category name information.
3. Spider Session Remover ( SID Killer ) - osCommerce, together with many other e-commerce packages, uses Session IDs to store and track information about customers. The session ID is the long collection of random characters located at the end of the shop URL:
   
   http://www.domain.com/product_info.php?products_id=33&osCsid=f255b7...3db6436432b7dc
   
   However, session ids can cause problems for some search engines. osCommerce gets round this problem by using logic, to check if the visitor to your store is a search engine spider or a potential customer (spider is the name given to the search engine robot which visits your site because it crawls all over your pages and through your links). If a spider is recognised, session IDs are not given to the spider thus enabling your pages to be indexed correctly.
   
4. Google Sitemap - As Google is the world's most used search engine, the Google search engine spider could be your most important visitor. Google have recently implemented a program where site owners can submit a Google specific sitemap for indexing. This is a great way to keep your site constantly indexed and updated by Google. Google Site Map contribution for osCommerce generate a sitemap containing urls to product pages for Google sitemap service. http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html
5. Site Map - An 'All Products' index page or site map (see our demo) gives a helping hand to the search engine spider. Ideally the page should contain a list of direct links to all your products and categories. This page can be useful for your customers also.
   A link to the 'All Products Page' should be located on your home page. This way, no matter how many categories and sub-categories you have, a link to every product is available within two steps for the search engine spider when it visits your site. If the spider is limited in resources (either time or the number of links it can follow) this means your products are more likely to be indexed than not.