SEO for osCommerce online store

Installing an osCommerce Merchant Store on your server is not hard at all: it can be done in only few minutes if you know what you are doing. Configuring the store is a little harder (especially if you want a job well-done), but it is manageable. One of the most important things you must consider when doing that is the search engine optimization of your online store, you do want to be on the on the first page on the Google/Yahoo/Bing search results when something is searching the products you are selling. Don't you?

Seo for osCommerce

Search engine optimization for osCommerce isn’t a difficult task if you have the right tools (the seo modules) and a some knowledge on how to optimize osCommerce sites. That optimization is not so different from the other sites, but it's more specific to the particularities of ecommerce websites.

1. Install osCommerce Seo Modules

The very first step after installing the original package (the osCommerce unmodified downloaded package) that should be done is to install some of the popular seo modules. It's not necessary to install them all, it's enough to install one of each category, by your choice. And it's not so strict, the next modules are the most popular, but if you think other module is better or you like it more just install it. Some of the most used meta tag addons are cDynamic Meta Tags, Header Tags SEO and Easy Meta Tags, the popular modules that generate search engines friendly URLs are SEO-G (it provides automatic generation of URLs) and Ultimate SEO URLs.

2. Perform Keyword Research

As always, choosing the right keywords is the most important part in the search engines optimization process. You should consider this when optimizing your osCommerce website:

The keyword relevance: your online store is targeted to some products and services and their audience (the people that are searching for them on the internet). Advanced seo modules use the product name, the manufacturer and/or the custom keywords you can define to generate seo URLs. Choosing the right keywords will get you more visitors and potential clients, choosing bad keywords will make the search engines avoid you when listing the results.

The keyword search volume: don't select too many keywords, it will only decrease their values. As I wrote before, you must keep the web page as simple as possible, filling it with a lot of different products and a lot of different keywords will only decrease the density of the specific target keywords (the one that have the best chances to bring your store to the first page on the search engines results).

3. Avoid duplicate content

Dynamic URLs may cause search engines crawlers to index multiple versions of the same page or product, as the shopping chart allows several ways the get to the same product: via the categories tree, the manufacture's products lists,  the price ascending or descending listing, and others.

Also, avoid repeating the description and the title for different products that have similar properties. Avoid the same meta tag description and meta tag keywords for different pages, even these pages are handling similar subjects.

All of these can cause some penalties for your pages and page ranks.

4. Meta Tag & Content optimization

Use the meta tag modules to optimize the title, description and keywords tags, your chosen keywords for the particular page/product should appear at least once in these tags and they should  be placed as close to the front as possible.

For example, the title of the home page should appear in the every page of the site, but after the category name, the manufacturer name and the product title when you are browsing the web site, on the categories tree, the manufacture's products lists and the product description (for example).

Neither the meta title nor the meta description tag should contain words like a, of, the, on, for, and, but..., etc because they decrease the relevance of the keywords. If the are really necessary, keep the number as low as possible.

5. Additional content

One of the most important flaws I've notice to some online stores and web pages is that they contain only the products list, some summary description and nothing else. There were some cases, for example woman beauty products, where I was almost lost (as a man I know only a few things about woman products) and I had to use the search engines to find another pages that told me how to use that particular product and why that should be use instead of others. Of course, I don't use woman beauty products, but that's a very good (and real - they where my customers, I've designed their web page) example.

The osCommerce offers you a very good system to sell your products online, but it does not offer you very much content. In order to be found more easily by others (strangers that never heard of you before) you must create additional content, something to explain why and how that strangers should use your products.

6. Link Building and Page Popularity

Until now I've only written about the on site search engine optimization. The off site seo (the off site link building) is an important part of the action and it can only increase your online story popularity and it can also bring targeted traffic to your site.

Keep always in mind to use the same keywords when you make the seo on the page and when you post links to other sites (as part of the links as well as part of the description). They always have to match the categories you are targeting on your site using these external links.