OpenCart Community

Hi everybody?

Will it be too hard to make seo urls?

Thanks

This has been talked, basically this isn't a urgent task.

Maybe anyone can make a contribution.

SEO for a shopping cart should be top on the things to do.

A cart is worthless if no one can find it.

If you require it now you will need to use OpenCart zero as I believe there is an addon to do what you want.

phpuk wrote:If you require it now you will need to use OpenCart zero as I believe there is an addon to do what you want.

It's actually built into the core already

Is there any chance to do an addon?

maddog986 wrote:SEO for a shopping cart should be top on the things to do.

A cart is worthless if no one can find it.

Many SEO features have been added to Opencart, probably more then ever. What you are referring to is pretty urls. They're called that because that's all they are. Google, Yahoo, MSN, they all index dynamic links. The need for mod rewrite was big about five years ago, but search engines have since gotten smarter and this is now more of a cosmetic issue then anything.

You may want to look into this: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/search ... ndly-urls/
Apache way of giving seo urls through PATH_INFO, but you need to know your way around php, a little.

Just putting my two cents in.

mdb is right. All of the major search engines have no problem with normal "123.com/index.php?route=xxx" addresses. Much like viruses, there is a heightened hype and mind set for people have, but they aren't important in "finding your site" anymore

Not to say that it isn't still nice to have. It is extremely useful nowadays with browsers like Firefox and opera that show the history as you type in the address bar... if a customer wanted to go back to a product they once visited, the historical url will show the product name in the url, making it easier for them to find that product again.

The querystrings still look horrible. Some sites (at least mine) relies on users posting links on other sites to our products, and with long and ugly URLs it just doesnt look professional and is harder to remember.

Also, Search Engines do give you a better listing if the querystrings are clearner, and even contain keywords. Google does this more than anyone else though. Example, If you search for a keyword, and its in a domain name, huge rank increase! If you go type in "free shopping cart" in google, you will see most, if not all, the results have "free", "shopping", or "cart" in the url somewhere. The bigger think is the Keywords.

Example (not very SEO):
youwebsite.com/product.php?path=something/bla/bla&id=4345r3

Could be much better if:
yourwebsite.com/product/4345/SKU_free_shopping_cart

If i knew php and the opencart system, i would make this addon. But since i don't, i can only bitch tell its done

maddog986 wrote:SEO for a shopping cart should be top on the things to do.

A cart is worthless if no one can find it.

it's important that page title are what you need, not URLs. now not metter seo urls or not..it's not 1990 when googe or other search engines didn't know how to crawl dynamic sites. It's important to have good page title and visitors - those 2 are the basic of good PR

Its also more professional to have clean urls. You dont info in them that customers dont need to see.

You can rewrite the urls in the .htaccess file if you have mod-rewrite installed in your server. If your host is using apache servers, then mod-rewrite should be installed and all you need to do is google how to rewrite urls in .htaccess. It is nice to have something like widgets.com/big-blue-widgets.html show up in your google search results snippet.

But what about different keywords and descriptions for different pages? Can Opencart do that?

Hi guys, you have given different way..
It's also helpful messages..
thanks for your sharing..

seo urls is going to be int he next version.

just one question!

is it better to auto generate urls or put a field in products, categories, manufacturers, information so users can enter the url keyword?

should the urls be all in lower case?

Daniel wrote: should the urls be all in lower case?

yes

Daniel wrote: is it better to auto generate urls or put a field in products, categories, manufacturers, information so users can enter the url keyword?

What about this:
User can put these words into products, categories, etc. manually BUT if he don't (keep it blank), keywords can be generated automatically I guess Quick.Cart works this way.

The best solution that I have seen IMO is to use a url key which, if entered is used in the format:
Where xx and xxx are the category and product ids respectively. If the url keys are not entered then they would be generated in lower case from the category or product names.

Another benefit of using the ID that this brings is that if an outdated or core url is accessed (e.g. the category for the product or the product name has changed) then you can 301 redirect to the correct url based on the ID of the category or product.

I've decided to let people use a keyword that they can enter via the product, category, manufactuer and information pages.

It won't be auto generated.

Daniel wrote:seo urls is going to be int he next version.

just one question!

is it better to auto generate urls or put a field in products, categories, manufacturers, information so users can enter the url keyword?

should the urls be all in lower case?

Lower case for sure.

About urls:
I am checking in to this because I am using magento and it drives me nuts.
I wouldn't make thinks more complicated then necessary.
Just look at Magento it takes for ever to create a page..

In place of making a blooded backend with a million config option pages. I would just create some config ini pages and add all the config options in to there.

It is a well-known fact nowadays that without SEO a Web site stands many chances of not being indexed by search spiders, therefore risking not being ranked high enough (or even at all) in the SERPs. The result: poor conversion rate.

This situation is quite easy to avoid by performing some "cosmetic" operations on a site. One of these operations, considered by some rather difficult and a bit time-consuming, but quite effective in the long run by others, is URL rewriting.