Zen Cart Tips and Tricks

The site map feature in Zen Cart is great. It helps search engines index your pages and can help customers find what they are looking for, especially on the 404 error pages.

There is another type of sitemap, well actually there are a few other types. XML, ROR, Text and HTML. There are plenty of scripts that will create one or all of these scripts, but the best on I’ve found is xml-sitemaps.com.

If you have a small shop then you can use the free online service, but to get the most out of a sitemap I strongly recommend you buy the unlimited sitemap generator. For $20 (About £10) it’s not going to eat too much into your budget.

Once you have the script upload it to your server as described in the documentation then bring up the configuration page.

Now, you can get away with using the default, but there are a few alterations to the configuration that will reduce the load on your server and bandwidth.

Main Parameters
The first section contains configuration options for the sitemap itself and which site maps you want to create. The only option I have ticked is the “create a text format sitemap for yahoo submissions”. You can use the txt file generated to submit it to the Yahoo! Site Explorer.
I don’t create a ROR file mainly because it just takes up more time and bandwidth and I don’t know of any search engines pay that much attention to it at the moment.

Sitemap Entry Attributes
I add new products on a weekly if not daily basis, so I have the frequency set to weekly. If you never add new products or very rarely you may want to set this to monthly.
Everything else can be left the same.

Miscellaneous Definitions
You can leave the Number of links per page to 1000. We are not creating a HTML sitemap anyway.
You can compress the site map if you like but unless your site is huge I don’t see the need to.
Make sure you have Ping Google ticked. Very important
If you have a Yahoo App ID then enter your ID, but if not don’t worry to much about it at this state.
I don’t bother with the Change Log as it just takes up more server time and bandwidth.
Create a username and password for security. We don’t want anyone messing with your sitemap now do we?

Narrow indexed pages
The only section that needs attention here is the Exclude URLs. Adding pages to exclude here will speed up the sitemap generation process, save bandwidth and also match the robots.txt file you (might) have.
So in the Exclude URLs add the following:
pages-advanced_search_result
review
reviews
search
pages-tell_a_friend
pages-ask_a_question
pages-popup_image
sort-
-ndex
%25s
ask_a_question.html
shopping_cart.html
unsubscribe.html
discount_coupon.html
gv_faq.html
contact_us.html
conditions.html
privacy.html
login.html
popup_image_additional.html
tell_a_friend
product_reviews_write.html
tell_a_friend.html
ask_a_question.html

Crawler Limitations
If you have a huge site then you might want to play around with some of these setting, but for most people the defaults will be fine.

Here are screenshots of my settings:

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Save the setting!
Now go to the crawling tab. Click on the run button and go make a cup of tea.
How long the process takes depends on the speed of your server and the size of your site. As a rough guide; my site took 5mins to index 369 pages totalling 15MBs.

The best thing to do it setup a cron Job. The command you need to run is on the Crawling page. If you’re not sure how to setup a cron job ask your hosting company. I’m sure they will only be too happy to help.
Make sure you set your job to run over night and set it to run once a week or if you don’t update very often once a month.
The great thing about setting up a cron job is once it’s don’t you don’t need to worry about it again.

One final tip is to check the broken links tab. This will, obviously tell you which pages have any broken links. MAKE SURE YOU FIX ANY BROKEN LINKS. Google doesn’t like broken links.

Give that a whirl and next I’ll show you how to submit it to Google webmaster tools.