osCommerce Blog - osCommerce solutions for business

Swindon, UK
26/02/2008

DataLink UK Ltd (trading as Holbi) is happy to announce the launch of its Search Engine Optimisation and PPC Campaign Management business. For many years DataLink UK has been providing its UK and international customers with high-quality complex Ecommerce solutions.

Having gathered a plenty of experience in optimising online stores of its customers, DataLink UK (Holbi) feels absolutely confident in being able to provide SEO and PPC Campaign Management services to its clients. One doesn’t have to be an Ecommerce client of DataLink UK to sign up for our SEO and PPC Campaign management services, but of course a special discounted rate has been reserved for existing customers.

SEO and PPC Campaign Management business of DataLink UK has an ambitious goal to become one of the leading providers of such services in the UK in the next 2 years. New employment opportunities will be shortly announced on our web sites.

To place an order for SEO and PPC Campaign Management service one doesn’t have to sign a 12 months contract immediately - we will gladly offer a 2 months trial to prove our ability to improve rankings of your web site in natural search results and also optimize performance and costs of PPC campaigns. We recognize only “white hat” techniques and “ethical” Search Engine Optimisation.

For more details about our new SEO and PPC Campaign Management service please contact DataLink UK Ltd (Holbi) at:

site:
www.holbi.co.uk
www.datalinkuk.com

email:
info@holbi.co.uk
info@datalinkuk.com

tel.:
+44 (0) 800 0112569

It’s a bit too late to write about osCommerce this Friday evening, but it’s a not bad idea to finish this business day (and this week!) by reviewing a very common problem that some of our osCommerce customers face, and a solution to it.

I’m talking about the situation when Google indexes category pages and doesn’t index individual product pages because it considers them not so important. Hence end customers, even if they look for exact product name in Google, will most probably find links leading them to product listing pages (category pages) where it might be hard to find a particular product. Product listing pages are likely to change with time, so a product which was there one day isn’t necessarily going to be there another day.

The most obvious solution recommended by SEO specialists is to try to extract product pages from Supplemental index and put them into Google’s Main index. This is achieved by either re-writing content of the product page making it more unique and keyword rich, or by adding a link to the individual product page from another page of the web site which is well ranked by Google. The result is not guaranteed though.

We have come up with a solution, which is not exactly an alternative to the above. It rather attacks the problem from another angel. The idea behind it is really simple: to give the customer what he or she is looking for, even if Google doesn’t want to do it. So, if the customer is looking for a particular product, but Google has only noticed that product name on some product listing page and brings the link to the product listing page in search results - we are going to redirect the customer to the desired product page anyway!

To do this, we extract the referral URL and then extract the keyword used by the customer. Then we check osCommerce database to see if there exist 1-5 products there that match the desired keyword. We then either send the customer to the originally clicked URL or to the Advanced Search Results page where the customer can see all matching products listed.

This way, no matter which link of the web site is indexed by Google, if it comes up in Google’s search results when the customer is searching for a particular product - the customer will be always given the product(s) he or she wanted to find.

Hence the conversion rate from visitors to actual customers will improve.

This method works very well when prospect customers are likely to search products by their model number or commonly used product name.

If you try this method - please write us back as we are always keen to know how our ideas help you to improve your osCommerce online stores!

P.S. one important note for osCommerce web masters - please do not forget to always implement 301 redirects as otherwise Google and other search engines may identify this technique as a SPAM SEO one.

Site maps help the users to find information they are looking for on the web site, and also help search engines a lot to index all pages of the web site. A site map is usually represented as a tree starting from the main page. A site map is like a navigation help for visitors of online store.

osCommerce site map

A site map for an online store would include:

• main categories
• sub categories of main categories
• best selling / featured products in a separate branch of the tree
• information pages

There exists a contribution for osCommerce that generates site maps. It can be
downloaded from this page and can generate site maps automatically based on the product catalog tables.

In osCommerce a link to the site map can be put into the footer or into the Information box.

Google and Yahoo! site maps

Google and other search engines have introduced their own site maps to get more precise and up to date information about changes in the web site structure. Updates to the site maps are provided by web masters and store owners directly.

Since the site map is submitted into the search engine directly, it is processed promptly, and the pages it consists of are indexed promptly as well. Again, any changes in the product catalog structure will be known to the search engine once the latest version of the site map is submitted. Therefore the search engine site map needs to be regenerated (preferably automatically) each time anything changes in the product catalog.

Google site map is an XML file that should be submitted into Google Web Master’s account. In order to become an approved web master for a certain web site, Google usually requires the web master to either upload a file with certain name to the web site, or add a temporarily META tag to the web site pages. Once the ownership / editing rights are approved by Google, and web master can submit the XML site map of the following format for Google site map index file.

Of course the files generated by the script can be altered if needs to be in order to highlight certain products or categories that are likely to change more often than the others, or are far more important than the others.

A contribution is available on osCommerce that can generate site maps for Google. It is based on the product catalog. It can be downloaded from this page. It’s preferable to use a contribution like this than 3d party site map generation tools. Having this contribution installed the store owner receives control over the process of site map generation and flexibility for further modifications.

Yahoo! site map submission service is a simpler solution that only accepts plain CSV files with only one column – web page URLs. The site map file can be uploaded to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

Many web sites suffer from their main (home) page has low page ranks in search engines, even though other pages are ranked well. The main reason for this is that there exist multiple links to different URLs of the main page of such web site from other web sites and from internal pages of the web site itself.

Page rank then splits between those multiple URLs, and none of them usually gets high rankings. When if there was only one URL to the main page of the web site – it would have had higher page ranks in the search engines.

This problem often appears in osCommerce online stores, when the main page can be referred in multiple different ways. For example, the main page can be referred as http://www.mystore.com and as http://mystore.com and as
http://www.mystore.com/index.php Effectively the page rank that could have
been given to the main page of such osCommerce online store is split between the three URLs, as search engines consider those three URLs to be different. More than that, a duplicate content issue may appear as well since all three different URLs would be pointing to one and the same page with one and the same content.

To avoid such issues in osCommerce the following fixes can be implemented:

• first lets solve the http://mystore.com and http://www.mystore.com issue by
  adding the following redirect command into .htaccess file, which is located in the
  root folder of the osCommerce web site:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mystore\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mystore.com/$1 [R=301,L]

• secondly, in the /includes/configure.php file make sure the web site URLs are
  properly specified. Like, for example:

define(’HTTP_SERVER’, ‘http://www.mystore.com’);
define(’HTTPS_SERVER’, ‘https://www.mystore.com’);

• finally, get rid of the http://www.mystore.com/index.php links and change
  those to http://www.mystore.com/ by modifying the .htaccess file again:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://www.mystore.com/ [R=301,L]

These fixes above assume osCommerce is running in the root folder of the web site.

Since HTML formats are issued by W3C.org, a valid web page complies to the W3C.org HTML formats and recommendations.

It has almost never been a case when web browsers required the pages to be 100% correct and valid HTML Almost any web browser allows for certain inconsistencies in HTML script that web masters sometimes use to create impressively looking web sites. Web browsers always try to find a way round such inconsistencies and compensate in different ways that merely depend on each particular browser. A web page with no inconsistencies is valid.

If so do the web browsers, if they allow for certain freedom in authoring HTML pages – does it mean the search engines ought to do the same? Actually the answer is – yes, this is how the search engines try to perform. Search engine bots try to extract as much content and textual information from web sites as possible to perform the most precise analysis of the extracted data. But what if a web page is not valid HTML, but rather a freely designed HTML pages with some parts of it not being valid accordingly to the formats? In that case search engine bots may incorrectly extract information from the web site, or miss some textual information that contains important keywords.
So there exist at least the following reasons to have web site pages valid:

• to make web pages look in the same way in different browsers that support the same HTML formats
• to avoid confusion and incorrect processing by different Search Engine bots, and allow the most of the important information to be properly extracted and indexed from the web pages

Even though there exist certain reasons not to validate the web sites (valid pages may not look and work as intended originally, time and costs involved may be quite valuable), for SEO purposes its recommended to keep osCommerce online store valid HTML.

What should be validated in osCommerce

All osCommerce online stores are similar at least in the file and web site structure. Whatever the actual names of the files are, it makes sense to have the following pages / files valid HTML:

• main (home) page
• category listing page
• advanced search page
• product information page
• shopping cart page
• information pages (like About Us, Terms and Conditions, etc)