Search Engine Forums, SEO Forum

Optimization of osCommerce for Google and other search engines.

An import part of running your online business is to ensure people can find you. Below we show you how to make you osCommerce web site search engine friendly - helping to ensure your pages become indexed.

There are two relatively simple steps, the first is to define your meta keywords, and secondly to make your main products visible to search engine robots.

Adding META tags - keywords and descriptions, and adding a relevant Title

TITLE info is defined in catalog/includes/languages/english.php (and other language files you are using).
Add a relevant TITLE, see approximately line 48. And for Meta keywords and descriptions add the following two lines:
define('KEYWORDS', 'keyword1, keyword2, etc, etc');
define('DESCRIPTION', 'Seiretto: Serious about Web Hosting');

Obviously replace the text: 'keyword1, keyword2, etc, etc' and 'Seiretto: Serious about Web Hosting' with relevant text.

Then in your catalog/index.php approximately line 40 you will find the <title> tags
add the following two lines after </title>
<?php echo "<meta name=\"keywords\" content=\"".KEYWORDS."\">"; ?>
<?php echo "<meta name=\"description\" content=\"".DESCRIPTION."\">"; ?>

and before </head>. Also, ensure you include the above two lines into catalog/product_info.php

Find out how to edit PHP files here.

How to ensure your top products are visible to search engine robots

The main issue here is dynamic urls, like:

http://Your-Site-.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=1&osCsid=52af2425423161a

Search engine bots just don't like this kind of url format. So how do you create pages that will get indexed?

Create folders (i.e. http://Your-Site-.com/MyBestProduct/ ) and add an index.php file to each folder containing just this:

<?
chdir("../catalog/");
$HTTP_GET_VARS['products_id']=1;
include ("product_info.php");
?>

You can create a folder for all products, but you should at least create folders for your most popular items. All you need to change in each index.php file is the number 1 to the relevant product number.

The folder names should be relevant to your products, if we were creating folders for our products then these would be:

/PHP-MySQL-Hosting/
/Web-Hosting-UK/
/osCommerce-Hosting-UK/
The folder names are relevant to keyword searches.

To ensure this is fully effective the new links should be linked from other pages within your site. A site map page can hold all the relevant links. To ensure your site map is found by search engine robots add a link to your site map from your footer.php file.