OSCommerce is a great FREE Shopping Cart System to use for you website but it does have some disadvantages in terms of SEO. Below we will list a few of OSCommerce’s problems with SEO and some solutions that you can implement or we can do for you.
Poor SEO Friendly Page URL Structures
Right out of the box OSCommerce has very Non-Search Engine Friendly page URL’s. The page URL is the address that you see in your web browsers address area.
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First off search engines dont like PHP very much, from this URL structure they can determine this site is php very easily. Second, a URL like this does not tell the search engine much. In the URL we should try to tell the search engines what is on that page and it really only makes sense to name the page accordinly. So if we have a product page that had red basball hats on it, we should have a URL structure like this:
http://www.oscommerce.com/red-baseball-hats/ —or— http://www.oscommerce.com/baseball-hats/red-baseball-hats.html
The Solution
There are a couple of solutions to this problem. The best solution is to install on of the Search Engine Friendly URL (SEF URL’s) contributions located in the contribution section at oscommerce.com like this one here
If you would like for us to install this contribution for you please contact us.
Solution 2
Another solution depending on how many URL’s you will be re-writing is to use .htaccess mod re-write. If you have never used htaccess or have no idea what it is, check out this page. It will basically allow you to serve search engines, web browsers and users a new URL structure, based on what you describe in your htaccess file.
If you would like help re-writing your websites URL’s using .htaccess please contact us.
No Title and Meta Tag Control
A default installation of OSCommerce allows the user no control of page titles, meta descriptions and keywords. This is very bad for SEO and just makes for sloppy looking search engine listings, if you have no control over them you have no control over your search engine listing.
The Solution
In order to take care of this issue you will need to install a Meta Tag Controller or Header Tag Controller contribution. This is probably the most popular one
If you need help installing this contribution please contact us.
