SEO

Functionality

SEO is a common acronym for Search Engine Optimization. Obviously, the add-on aims at helping you optimize your web store for search engines and improve its ranking.

Optimization consists in replacing unattractive dynamic URLs like http://www.example.com/index.php?dispatch=products.view&product_id=1533 containing query strings and ancillary data with clean search engine friendly URLs like: http://www.example.com/true_product_name.html.

Such URLs not only help search engines to index store pages, but they also improve your customers’ experience, as clean URLs are human-readable and thus are easy to perceive and remember.

Note

The add-on requires that your web server have a URL rewriter installed. For the Apache HTTP Server or any Apache interchangeable implementation it must be the mod_rewrite module. For Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) it must be ISAPI_Rewrite.

Rich Snippets

When you search for something with Google search engine, you can see few lines of text under every search result. These are snippets. They help users to understand what is a page about and why it is relevant to their query.

Rich snippet

Rich snippet is a markup easily understood by search engines that base on this markup when displaying additional data in search results.

In CS-Cart rich snippets for product pages are generated automatically. The snippet contents are formed based on some product information such as description and price. To check the rich snippet for particular product, do the following:

  1. In the Administration panel, go to Products → Products.
  2. Choose a product and open its editing page by clicking on the product name.
  3. On the opened page choose the SEO tab.
  4. You can see the rich snippet at the bottom of the page in the Google rich snippets preview section.
Google rich snippets preview

Management of SEO Names

You can change the format of SEO names in your store if needed. It can be done in the SEO add-on settings. Find out more about how to confugure the add-on.

The number is added to a SEO name if the same name is already in use for another object (product, category, etc). This was created so that if the administrator gives the same name for two categories (products, manufacturers, etc), CS-Cart adds 1 to SEO name of the second category automatically.

Important

For example, if the administrator gives the SEO name Books to a category аnd then gives the same name to another one, CS-Cart adds 1 to the second one. And after that, the first category will have the Books name and the second one will have the Books1 name.

If the administrator gives the SEO name Books to one more category CS-Cart adds 1-2 to the SEO name of this category and so on.

Canonical URLs

To make you site better understood by search engines, canonical URLs for categories and products are generated in CS-Cart.

If some URL is marked as the canonical, search engine robot understands that this is the original content URL and there is no need to index its duplicates. The example is the same page with products or categories list, but with different sortings. There is no need to index all these page variants, and using canonical URLs is very useful here.