*Sponsored Presentation*
osCommerce is an open source online e-commerce solution which lets anybody build a e-store with products to sell by helping them build their online shop and accepting payments online.
Though it may not be the most quaint solution for someone who’s big on SEO for search engine traffic. As the software gives all sorts of weird URL’s to specific product pages mixed with a bunch of numbers, “?” and “id=”, or better known as dynamic URL’s. But perhaps this next tool will make you change your mind about using osCommerce to run your online shop.
Magic SEO URL is an osCommerce SEO tool that will change all your dynamic URL’s to well structured search engine friendly ones. So all your pages get spidered and indexed. Some of the main features include -
- verification and validation of each URL
- redirections from all native osCommerce URLs
- does not break any add-ons, modules or templates
Best of all it is all handled with one line of code for installation.
About the author
Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.
Kym on June 20th, 2007
1
Great post! Opens a lot of good discussion
The URLs produced by osCommerce MS2.2 are standard URLs produced by any php based site and nothing specifically to do with osCommerce. While it might have been an issues at one time, Search Engines spiders have no problems reading them these days.
Any changes to php based URL’s is generally done by use of mod_rewrite which is dependent on server settings. The product you mention is a commercial product. However, there are quite a few contributions on the osCommerce Contributions site that can modify URLs to be more search engine friendly which are completely free to use. The most lauded being Ultimate SE URLs by Chemo.
However the bottom line is that Search Engines are quite intelligent these days and they can quite easily read php URLs such as you describe. So changing them is not a requirement in order to get indexed. As evidenced by the numerous osCommerce sites that are indexed by Google and in fact make page #1 of Google.
With SEO it still remains that optimized content and good backlinks are the things to focus on. With URLs the idea is to add keywords and make them more human friendly.
Eric Smith on July 21st, 2007
2
Would this work with sites from IbanezWebSolutions?