osCommerce SEO

As recognised experts in the field of osCommerce and winners of the osCommerce Web Professional of the year in 2008, 2009 and 2010 (see osc-awards.com for full details), our partner website logon.info has a solid and proven track record of working with osCommerce and derivative projects (CRELoaded, ZenCart, TomatoCart, osCMax etc etc). With this wealth of experience combined with the talent pool of search engine optimisers at Flosee, we believe we are in the perfect position to provide high quality osCommerce SEO services.

If you are looking for general advice relating to your own osCommerce SEO efforts, then we have compiled a list of the best techniques below. But first, we would like to take the opportunity to tell you a little bit about our osCommerce SEO service, and if you don’t have the time to complete your own search engine optimisation for osCommerce, then please do get in touch with us for a full discussion about how we can start driving buying customers to your website.

As with all of our search activity, we take great pride in being a company which tries to learn more about your business, your products and your target audience. With this information we are then able to identify a list of target searchstrings which your customers are likely to enter into the search engines at the point they are making a decision to purchase. This osCommerce SEO technique and our application of it mean that when we get results, your sales go through the roof. Our success is directly measured by YOUR success.

Proven osCommerce SEO

We have been working in the field of osCommerce SEO since 2003, initially starting with our own jewellery website niknakgroup. At the point we sold this company, it ranked worldwide for the keyword “jewellery” in first position (please see our linkedIn profile and view the recommendation for John Grant, the person who bought niknakgroup for proof of this fact). Ever since then we have consistently been delivering osCommerce SEO results, driving over £4 million worth of new business to our clients in 2010. Using a combination of Google Analytics, our own in house reporting tools and your sales data, we can quantify for you exactly WHAT effect the work we do on your behalf is having on your sales. We dont take credit for direct type-ins, for visitors from other sources or for repeat customers, we only look at the new customers we send to you and the sales that come from them, and by then referencing these against the statistics in your osC admin area we can give you an exact figure to demonstrate a solid return on investment.

It is very easy to claim that we are experts at osCommerce SEO, but we believe that the best evidence comes in the form of hard facts. As award winners working with osCommerce, proven and well respected in the field of search engine optimisation and with fully transparent reporting (of the progress we make and the work we do), we honestly know of no other company in the world which can deliver this combination of services, quality and experience to you as an osCommerce website owner. Our osCommerce SEO packages start at just £250 per month and we are happy to work with you on the best combination of tactics we can use to get the desired effect on your website.

osCommerce SEO – Do It Yourself

We appreciate that not every business is at the point where you can commit to an ongoing package, and whiilst we do offer one off SEO services, we have compiled a list of contributions, modifications and methods that you can apply to your own osCommerce website that will have a positive effect on yoru osCommerce SEO results. Please feel free to use the comments form to add your own advice or to ask any follow up questions relating to the advice. We are committed to your success and appreciate your input to our website.

So, without further rambling, here is our killer set of tweaks for your onsite osCommerce SEO which will ensure search engines can find your content, understand what keywords it relates to and then index it in a good position in the natural search results.

• Contributions to install for osCommerce SEO
1. Header Tags SEO V 3.0
   This contribution allows you to enter meta tag data for each of your categories, pages and products. This seemingly simple addition to your site means that you are able to tell the search engines right at the very top of your html what the page is about, which words are important (and therefore which words you would like it to be indexed under) and how it relates to the rest of your websites content. Adding title tags, meta description and meta keywords to your page you will massively improve your rankings across all major search engines. This does require quite a bit of work on an established website, as you will need to modify every single category and product description to incorporate the meta tags, but the effort will definitely reap rewards for your osCommerce SEO.
2. Google Sitemap Generator
   This simple to install contribution adds a google sitemap to your site. A google sitemap enhances your osCommerce SEO by allowing the search engines to quickly read a simple file, formatted in a way which makes it incredibly easy for the engines to read, which tells themexactly where all of your category and product pages are. If combined with the Chemos Ultimate SEO URL’s (see below), this simple addon will mean that your entire site gets indexed, and new content is picked up very quickly. Despite the name, there is nothing to say that only Google should have access to this file. Whilst Google will allow you to submit the file at regular intervals automatically, we normally include a static link within your footer so that the other search engines can also read it and therefore index your content quickly.
3. Dynamic SiteMap V 1.0
   This is another way of indexing all of your internal links, but it differs from the Google sitemap in that it is targetted principally at humans. With our ethos of humans first, this is vitally important as it allows your visitors to access a single page which contains all of your products, organised in a way which means they can quickly see everything you have to offer. However, search engines will ALSO find this page and it will allow them a second source of links to all of your pages, in a similar way to the Google Sitemap above. The difference is that this version will put your sitemap WITHIN your template wrapper, meaning that all of your header and background html is also being served, whilst the Google Sitemap serves ONLY your links. We would recommend adding both of these contributions for maximum effect in your osCommerce SEO strategy.
4. Google Base / Froogle Data Feeder v1.00
   In addition to the normal sitemaps, there are also other ways in which you can send Google your products, and as Google has a product search tool, it makes sense to also send your products into this. There are certain types of business where this is NOT a good idea – for instance wholesalers who are selling mixed lots will find that very few (if any) of their intended customers would use the Google Products tool, and even if they did then the chances of entering a search query that matched a mixed lot would be very slim. However, if you sell to consumers and have recognisable products (i.e. branded) that people would search to compare prices, service and delivery times then the Google Base addon is an essential contrinbution for your osCommerce SEO. Again, relatively simple to setup, this tool can be set up to run on auto-pilot, sending your updated product feed at set intervals.
5. Chemos Ultimate SEO URL’s
   Chemo sadly passed away in 2010, and he will be sorely missed by many within the open source community. He left behind a large number of contributions, forum posts and pieces of work which will serve as a great legacy for a man who truly embraced everything there was about open source coding. We believe this particular contribution is one of the most outstanding items of his work, and the results really do speak for themselves. By modifying the standard osCommerce links from

   /index.php?cPath=2&products_id=123

   to a much more search friendly version such as

   /your-keyword-rich-product-title-p-123.html

   This osCommerce SEO contribution will ensure that the pages you have indexed in Google and other search engines will very quickly move up the rankings. By building relevancy into the links themselves, and by putting keyword rich URLS onto your site these enable the search engines to identify how to index your pages, and also make it easier for humans to tell each other what your links are – by being plain english (or whichever language your site runs in as they are multilingual urls), your site becomes more human friendly as well as search engine friendly. This contribution is one of the most downloaded of all time, and definitely stands out as the single most effective osCommerce SEO contribution in our opinion. If you add NONE of the other contributions we recommend, please make sure you add this one.

• Changes to navigation for osCommerce SEO

This might seem to be counter productive, but is probably the most difficult element of your own osCommerce SEO to get right – and one of the most important. There are a number of rules to consider, and for each of them you need to take into account both your visitors to the site (can they get where they need to go and is it obvious how they can do so) and to search engines (can they access your content quickly and easily?). The elements you should consider are:

1. Keyword rich navigation – think about your industry, and the searches your customers are likely to be entering. Does your category structure match these most common queries? Dividing your website into chunks that match the specific types of search your clients are likely to enter will ensure that you have a keyword rich category tree that also makes sense to end users. This osCommerce SEO technique is referred to as “siloing” and divides your webiste into niche areas, each of which focuses strongly on one particular theme. For example, if you sell womens clothing, your top level categories might include dresses and skirts. Within dresses you could then sub-categorise to “floral dresses” and “party dresses” and so on…..this build a high relevancy factor (using latent semantic indexing methods) to this area of your site, as well as being a logical progression for your customers to follow.
2. Depth of category tree – People like clicking around websites, but they will only click a finite amount of times if they dont see something that interests them, or can find what they are looking for. osCommerce allows you to paginate your categories (i.e. show the products within a category across multiple pages), but most end users will not click onto the second page if they have not seen something of interest on the first page. If you have 50 pages within a category, then you seriously need to consider sub-categorising. Search engines are also very unlikely to click onto supplemental pages, which means these products on later results are very unlikely to get indexed, let alone acheive a high ranking. HOWEVER – don’t get caught out by making so many categories and sub categories that your customers are trying to work through a rabbit warren. As a rule of thumb, we try to keep all products two, three or (at an extreme push) four clicks away from your home page. Remember that if you are changing your category structure on an established website, it is essential for your ongoing osCommerce SEO that you use 301 redirects to point the search engines to your new content.
3. Accessibility – your navigation needs to be fully visible and clickable by all of your users – human and search engine alike. Remember that whilst Flash can look amazing, the search engine robots are extremely unlikely to click a link within Flash content, and the same will apply to a javascript triggered link. Javascript in combination with css for seo will normally allow full access, but test – dont presume. If a Flash or javascript menu is a must-have for your design, then consider adding a text based navigation tree elsewhere on your page. We quite often add this to the footer area of a site to allow the search engines to actually see the osCommerce SEO you have applied to the whole of your site.
4. Don’t miss opportunities – If you have categories, sub categories and even deeper categories within your navigational structure, take advantage of them. Add content to each and every one of these layers which explains to your visitors what the page is for, what you would like them to do next and why you have added the page. This content will also then allow the search engines to understand your logic, and index the page appropriately. A user searching for “Floral dresses” is much more likely to stay on your site if the link they click in the search results comes directly to the matching page on your website rather than to your homepage. Useful content (content is a key component of osCommerce SEO) which reads well will enhance your chances of this happening, and also add to your claim to be relevant to the subject as a whole – the floral dress page after all is a child of the dresses page, and the one builds relvancy to the other.
• Changes to content for osCommerce SEO

Now that you have added your contributions and amended your navigational structure, this is the point at which you need to look at the actual content of your pages. This can seem a massively daunting task, especially on a large established site, so we would recommend breaking it down into bite size chunks and doing a manufacturer or a category at a time. You will see that the areas you have updated will start delivering higher sales through higher search positions, and this will then give you the incentive to continue with the task. osCommerce SEO, whilst applied to osC code, is no different to any other kind of SEO, and if you don’t have content, then you are almost guaranteed to fail in your search attack strategy.

The most common mistake we see with osCommerce SEO is that store owners add a title and an image, and very little by way of product description. The most commonly cited reason for this is that the product is very simple/basic and that the picture speaks for itself. That may well be true, but unfortunately search engines can’t understand imagery, so they do need some good content to read before they can decide whether the page is relevant to a particular search query. Good content is defined as information that is relevant to the page it sits on, which reads well and which is informative. Entering keyword heavy text which has no value to a human visitor will NOT help you. One example we recently saw was for a crockery wholesaler, selling plain white circular plates. This was teh classic “the image and title say it all” scenario. However, once we got started it wasn’t actually that hard to write 500 words about the product, and these in turn then delivered higher sales of this particular item as customers questions were answered with the content. Writing about the quality, manufacture process and possible uses very quickly filled some white space and changed the ranking of that single page from outside the top 1000 results to 3rd place within 3 days. No other changes were made, no other links built and no SEO techniques applied – simply adding a description delivered this stunning change.

The same will apply to your category pages – adding a simple yet informative piece of text will build the relevancy of your entire site and also help that specific page to come up on longtail search strings – the ones which deliver sales.

We hope this article on osCommerce SEO has informed and helped you – please feel free to use the comments form below to ask your questions or add your own osCommerce SEO tips and hints.