Search Engine Optimization for osCommerce Online Shops

Search engine optimisation is a form of marketing. It is the process of making a site or individual web pages relevant to particular keyword searches performed on search engines. In short, the better optimised the web page is, the higher the ranking it will achieve in search engine results.

Where should a Shop Owner start: Try to approach search engine optimisation with a plan. How would you search for your products? Which search engine would you use? Ask friends, colleagues and your current customers. Then you need to identify about 5 to 10 words and phrases that people are most likely to use in a search for your site. These are your keywords and key phrases. This might apply to your site as a whole or an individual page showing a particular product.

The next step is to integrate your keywords and key phrases into your normal product descriptions. Once you have the page content right, you then have a base to apply other optimisation techniques such as Meta tags, session IDs, a site map and inbound links.

Meta Tags - Meta tags alone will not give you a high search engine ranking but a coordinated effort to integrate your Meta tags to the content of the page and to your products can improve significantly your search engine ranking for relevant keywords or key phrases.

Meta Tags (also known as Header tags) store extra information about your web pages that can not be viewed in the normal way. This behind-the-scenes data is used by most search engines to gather extra information about your web pages. You can view the Meta tag information of a specific page by viewing the source code of the page. I

Meta tags can only support the normal textural content of your pages. For each product page you need to change the Meta tags to reflect the keywords in your product description. In osCommerce this can be done using the Meta Tags Contribution.

Search Engine Friendly URLs - The text of the URL or web address is an extra source of important information for the search engine spider. Having your main keywords in the URL for each product and category page can significantly help your search engine rankings. Search Engine Friendly URLs use a server feature called mod_rewrite to rewrite the URL so that the outside world sees only the URL generated by the database from the product name and category name information.

From this: http://www.babyben.co.uk/product_info.php?products_id=1026
To this: http://www.babyben.co.uk/bushaby-waterproof-baby-suit-p-1026.html

Google Sitemap - As Google is the world’s most used search engine, the Google search engine spider could be your most important visitor. Google have recently implemented a program where site owners can submit a Google specific sitemap for indexing. This is a great way to keep your site constantly indexed and updated by Google.

The Google Sitemap Update for osCommerce effortlessly creates a Google formatted sitemap of your category and product pages. You can then submit this sitemap for Google to interrogate. Although you don’t need a Google account to use the Google sitemap service with an osCommerce based website, we strongly encourage you to create an account because you can then view important diagnostic information via the Google Sitemap web pages.

All Products Page / Site Map - An ‘All Products’ index page or site map gives a helping hand to the search engine spider. Ideally the page should contain a list of direct links to all your products and categories. This page can be useful for your customers also.

Inbound Links - Most experts agree that the single most important contributing factor in achieving a high search engine ranking is link popularity. Inbound links to your site will raise its importance to search engines. Search engines take the view that if others link to your site or a specific page, then that web page must have something to offer other users.