Zen Cart Tips and Tricks

OK before I continue this article, don’t get all excited thinking that what I’m say here will get you number one for your keywords in Google. It’s just something I’ve been reading a lot about on the SEO blogs and forums and it appears to help with getting more pages into the search engine indexes and help towards ranking.

I’ve been trying it out on my sites and it’s does seem to help. Although I haven’t got any concrete evidence of it. My theory is this method is just 1 task of many to help achieve better rankings in the search engines.

So what is nofollow? Nofollow is a tag that you put into your html links that tells the search engines not to index the page that the link points to. The reason Google created this tag was to help sites get more relevant pages into their index, which they hope would reduce spammy sites.

The best/ simplest way I can explain this is if you imagine your home page as a jug of water (known as ‘link juice’ in the SEO world). Let say Google gives your home page 10 pints of water. Now if your home page has 10 links to other page on your site then Google will share out that 10 pints between each page, meaning each page will get 1 pint (forget external and incoming links at this point). Now some of those links are not going to be important to Google. They might be important to customers but not when it comes to SEO. So what you need to do is tell Google which of those pages are not important to its index. Let’s say 5 of the links on your front page aren’t important and we block Google from indexing them. This means the 5 more important pages will get 2 pints of water rather than 1. Which also give more “link juice” to the next set of pages.

So straight away we have increased the importance of those pages. Which should not only help with ranking those pages, but also ranking pages deeper into your site?

Now put this in relation to Zen Cart. On your site you’re likely to have links to your contact us page, privacy page, terms and conditions, shopping cart, log in page and other pages that aren’t important to search engines. So adding a nofollow tag to those links will help Google index more important pages, like the category and product pages. The theory is the important product and category pages are more likely to get indexed and possibly give them a better ranking in the search results.

OK, so that hopefully this explains the theory behind nofollow? This is by no way or means a silver bullet that will get you top of Google and bring a load of new sales, but it is another alteration you can make to your site that helps in the ongoing campaign to get better rankings and more important pages in search engine indexes.

In part 2 I’ll go through how to add the nofollow tag to the links your Zen Cart site. In the meantime feel free to read more about nofollow:

Resources:

• What is nofollow
• Using nofollow to control internal link structure
• More on nofollow at SEO Book

Check back soon for part 2 and how to apply nofollow to your zen cart shop.