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osCommerce

The e-commerce.

SEO, Meta Tags, SEF Urls and osCommerce


toyicebear

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Lately there seems to be many questions regarding seo, sef urls and meta tags...so as to make the search for info a bit easier for newbees i have added some elemetary info:

 

1. SEO/SEF Urls

 

In the osCommerce shop admin let - Use search engine friendly urls (In development) - be set to "false"

 

(Setting them to true might give you the dreaded error message: Error! Unable to determine the page link! )

 

If you want to change the url format , use on of the seo/sef urls contributions.

 

The most used one, which also has easy install and work together with most other contributions is: Ultimate Seo Urls

 

For other alternatives look here...

 

2. Meta Tags

 

Standard osCommerce 2.2 does not have any meta tags solution so you will have to install one from the contributions section.

 

The 2 most used ones are, Header Tags Controller and cDynamic Meta Tags.

 

There is also this one, header tags for novices , which is said to be an easy install. (Have not tested it personally, so i can not give any pros and cons on this one)

 

For more info and more alternatives look here....

 

3. Site Map

 

4. All Products Page

 

5. Google XML Sitemaps

 

6. Google Base/Froogle feeds

 

 

Thanks for the info I have used many of them now.......

Complete Newbie On The Learn - Not A Programmer

But Learning As I Go

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  • 3 months later...

Some more SEO tips

 

1. Check your generated sitemaps and feeds!

I found (may be it is fixed by now), if you use SEO URLs, sitemaps are generated with non-SEO URLs. You may want to modify sitemaps generation code to fix the issue.

 

2. Also, make sure that all URLs through your site have same domain name. If your site is www.mysite.com, both www.mysite.com and mysite.com (note the absense of www prefix) will bring up your site, but, it seems, that search engines do separate them!

 

3. Add following to the .htaccess file: (modify as suited)

# Cache control

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 month"

ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month"

ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 month"

ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 month"

ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month"

 

This controls cache in user browsers. In my case, it instructs browser to keep copy of pictures and CSS files for 1 month before refreshing. This speeds up page loading a lot at customer end.

 

Rudolf

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Some more SEO tips

 

1. Check your generated sitemaps and feeds!

I found (may be it is fixed by now), if you use SEO URLs, sitemaps are generated with non-SEO URLs. You may want to modify sitemaps generation code to fix the issue.

This shouldn't happen if you are using Ultimate SEO 2.2d and Google XML Sitemap SEO. They work fine together and don't require code changes to get them to work.

Support Links:

For Hire: Contact me for anything you need help with for your shop: upgrading, hosting, repairs, code written, etc.

Get the latest versions of my addons

Recommended SEO Addons

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  • 1 year later...

Header Tags Controller is now Header Tags SEO and does not work with (the more important seo plugin) Ultimate Seo Urls

 

Please update the first post in this thread as I have just spend several days working this out. There also seems no easy

way to remove the Header Tags SEO plugin. I am going to reinstall the cart from scratch to remove it because it seems

like less effort and thankfully, I did not install on a live cart.

 

I found that http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,8015 does work with Ultimate SEO Urls. It provides basic

meta tags for products, manufacturers and categories.

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Disregard last posters info, it is not correct. Header Tags SEO does work just fine with Ultimate SEO Urls.

 

But for those who wish an easier install, then both Easy Meta Tags and KissMT Dynamic SEO Meta & Canonical Header Tags are easy to add and works just fine with Ultimate SEO Urls.

 

 

HeaderTags SEO works well together with the Ultimate SEO 2-2.2 series mod, BUT if you use one of FWR medias Ultimate SEO Urls (USU 5) mods , then some adjustments might have to be made to make them play nice together especially if you use "standard" and not "rewrite" mode.

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  • 5 months later...

Can somebody walk me through how to add a community add on? I don't get it. When I access my ftp, on don't see any files on the server that would resemble a normal website. I'm in the public html folder but nothing show up and when I try to "install module" when logged into the admin section, nothing really happens.

 

Thanks!

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To install an add-on.

 

1. Download the wanted add-on. (make sure its a full version and not just an upgrade)

 

2. Read and follow the install instructions included in the add-on.

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Thanks. :)

 

What's the best way to backup the database and files of an oscommerce store? The manual says to do that. I downloaded everything locally via ftp just now but it wasn't much.

 

Any ideas would help.

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Thanks. :)

 

What's the best way to backup the database and files of an oscommerce store? The manual says to do that. I downloaded everything locally via ftp just now but it wasn't much.

 

Any ideas would help.

 

This is not in any way related to this topic. This is for questions related to SEO, Meta Tags and SEF Urls.

 

You should eighter search through the forum for topics/posts related to your question or post a new support topic about your questions.

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