Zen Cart Tips and Tricks

This may sound obvious but getting the name of your categories and products is vitally important. Not just to make your site user friendly but also to help search engines get a good idea of what that page is about.

The heading at the top of the zen cart system is in a H1 tag, which search engines love. H1 (and other H tags for that matter) give search engines a great idea of what that particular page is about.
Before you start building your categories you should have a good think about the hierarchy you want to implement and what you want each category to be called.
A mistake I made when I first started my pet shop was calling my top level categories dogs, cats, birds, etc. When what I should have done is named them Products for dogs, products for cats, etc, etc. Not only does this make it more clear for my users but also search engines as well.

The same goes for product names. Back in the day I would have a sub category of Dog Kennels then under that all my products which would go by the name of wooden kennel, apex kennel, etc. Again, I should have wooden dog kennel and apex dog kennel. If dog kennel is a main keyword for you then you’ve just manage to get the keyword on to your site more often, without having to stuff they keyword elsewhere and possibly having search engines penalise you for keyword stuffing.

Also, don’t forget that the title you use in your categories and products is used as the page title and if you use SEF URLs then the title will also form part of the URL. Both are big pluses with the search engines.

So that’s pretty much it. Always get your keywords into your category and product titles. It will definitely help towards better rankings and probably help conversion along the way.