Effective SEO using OS Commerce

Published on February 1, 2009 by Mr nCoded · No Comments

After working with OSCommerce over the last few years we thought it would be good to pass on some of the knowledge and experience nCoded has gained in this time.

If you are wondering how effective our OSCommerce SEO has been then you should note that the best SEO results we have so far achieved were page 1 out of 77 million SRP (search result pages) which is obviously very good! The search term that we achieved this for was “Home Furniture”, and the other companies around us on page 1 were Ikea, Debenhams, Tesco Direct, Argos, & Marks and Spencer.

If you are wondering if we managed to achieve this using OSCommerce then you will pleased to note that we did, which basically goes to show how powerful (in terms of SEO) this e-commerce application can be. Although saying this, clearly if we had used a much more modern application such as Magento – then we probably would have only have had to put in around 50% of the SEO effort which of course equates to time and capital.

However before you jump ship to Magento you should note that Magento is built using object based PHP 5 and therefore the trade off is that some of the simple hacks that you can do with OSCommerce become complicated with Magento. Also another key issue to remember is that procedure PHP programmers are far cheaper and in more supply than object based PHP 5 programmers!

Okay let us know take a look at some of the stuff you can do with OSCommerce to make it more effective in terms of SEO.

The first thing that is absolutely key to effective SEO using OSCommerce is categories, or rather creating the correct categories for your industry. This is not only very important to make your shop intuitive to use (and hence help’s your potential customers to find the correct products) but also for SEO keywords.

In our opinion the best thing to do is to keep the main set of categories as generic as possible and then drill down for subcategories. We would also highly recommend that you do not do categories deeper than 2 levels, for many reasons, including most themes not being able to handle them.

Just to be clear let us give you some examples using the format: Category 1 -> Sub Category

Mirrors -> Ornate Mirrors | Bedroom Furniture -> Mirrors

As you can see from above there are many ways you can structure your categories; some shops will structure them by products such as Mirrors and Ornate Mirrors, whereas others will structure them on Room and then furniture.

I guess it all depends really on how you expect your customers to find your products. If you were to perform professional analysis on this (to get the best solution) then you would take a look at which keywords have the most search results per month and go with this.

Now this is where more modern applications start to take the lead somewhat. Ideally you not only want product type, but also room type, material type, and even cost. Doing this allows the customer to search for products in the way they want and unfortunately OSCommerce (so far, without plug-ins) cannot do this. This is of course way Magento shines due to not only tags but also product attributes.

There are many more ways you can modify oscommerce to make your shop SEO far more effective. Below we outline a few that we hope to expand at a later date. If however you run your own OSCommerce online store and are desperate to make your SEO more effective leading to more sales, then why not bring in nCoded to achieve this? Just get in touch.