In this article we'll discuss why Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs in an osCommerce store are vital to the overall site Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Also covered are the different contributions and methods available for transforming category, product, and manufacturer links to a more spider friendly version.
If you've successfully launched your osCommerce store, you've no doubt turned your attention to attracting customers to your site and making sales. Of course, your main focus is where your site shows up in the most popular search engine result pages, or SERPs for short. In doing searches for products you offer on search engines like Google, Yahoo!, or MSN, your site is probably near the bottom in the SERPs. So the question is, what simple changes can you make to improve your store's ranking with respect to competing websites.
Among many other SEO modifications you can make to improve your site, like meta tag optimizations, targeted and keyword-rich product descriptions, etc., perhaps the first you should consider is Search Engine Friendly URLs. A "clean" version of osCommerce (one having no modifications or major configuration changes) doesn't produce category, product, or manufacturer links containing relevant content or keywords. By default, these links point to a file with a database id in the parameters. Store owners do have the option to enable a pre-installed module for producing SEF URLs, but this doesn't provide the customer, or for that matter a search engine, with a discernible URL in relation to the category or product. The scripting simply splits the parameters, reassembles the URL with forward slashes, and still suffixes it with the appropriate database id. Although the forward slash is more friendly to URLs than the question mark and many ampersands, the link is still non-descriptive.
That being said, there are many alternate contributions and/or modifications out there to relate your osCommerce URLs to category, product, and manufacturer names and descriptions. Having worked on many stores with previous modifications, I've seen every form of URL tweaking you can imagine. One such example includes creating subfolders within your website for each product/category, creating a small index.php file within each, and coding that file to redirect back to product_info.php for each designated product_id. This method does make page links more descriptive, but if you've got a lot of products and products, the task can become quite labor intensive.
Simpler, more efficient modules do exist for osCommerce. My personal experience is that the Ultimate SEO URLs (USU) and Search Engine Friendly URL (SEFU) contributions are the most stable. There are, however, differences between the two packages. The contributions, using different rewrite scripts, translated URLs as illustrated below.
- Ultimate SEO URLs
http://www.yourstore.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=X
becomes...
http://www.yourstore.com/catalog/product-name-p-X.html
- Search Engine Friendly URL
http://www.yourstore.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=X
becomes...
http://www.yourstore.com/catalog/category-name/product-name
The Ultimate SEO URLs and Search Engine Friendly URL modules both have advantages and disadvantages. Let's compare the two side-by-side...
|
Ultimate SEO URLs |
Search Engine Friendly URL |
| Eliminates URL Parameters? |
YES |
YES |
| Requires osCommerce SEF URLs enabled? |
NO |
YES |
| Cache for Improved Site Performance? |
YES |
NO |
| Moves Product Display To Index.php? |
NO |
YES |
| Requires Edit of Root .htaccess? |
YES |
YES |
In comparing these modules, you can see the major differences are performance and compatibility. If you wish to install SEFU in your osCommerce store, test the standard "Use Search-Engine Safe URLs (still in development)" configuration setting. Set it to "True", and test the links in your store. If you get an error message stating "Error: unable to determine page link", you won't be able to use this module. Also, both modules require editing of the root folder .htaccess file. If your host doesn't allow this, neither will contribution will work.
Our experience with osCommerce stores in use on a variety of servers is that due to the caching provided by USU, overall performance does not suffer from the URL rewriting. Also, as an added benefit, this package carries the capability to perform similar URL rewriting for the Article Manager and Information Pages Unlimited contributions. Given these facts, we recommend installing the Ultimate SEO URLs module.
In conclusion, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of quality, unique, and keyword rich content in your product descriptions. Internet marketing experts all agree that organic content is becoming more and more important in search engine algorithms. Also, in addition to your product descriptions, that you can create great, relevant content by creating FAQ topics and articles like these within your osCommerce store.
Cordially,
David |
