Zen Cart Tips and Tricks

If you haven’t got any sort of stats gathering program on your site then you should. Stats are very important, especially when it comes to selling stuff online. I’m a huge fan of Google Analytics. A) It’s very in depth and b) it’s my favorite price; free!

Read the rest of this entry »

So in part one of nofollow your way to more pages in Google I, hopefully, explained how you can use the nofollow tag in your internal links to get Google to pay more attention to the more important zen cart page, like the category and product pages.
In part 2 I’ll show you how to add the nofollow tag to certain links on your site.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

If like me you don’t use the stock features in Zen Cart then it’s very annoying how you cannot de-active a product attribute until it comes back into stock. This means you have to delete the attribute then re-add it back in when stocks arrive.

What I currently do is add some text in red letter telling the customer if a certain size, colour, etc is out of stock and leave the attribute in. The problem with that is customer hardly ever read descriptions! I can have a big red BLUE IS OUT OF STOCK, but some will still buy one.

Today I discovered a nice little hack to prevent a customer adding an out of stock item to the cart.
Basically it utilities the Display Only option in the Attributes Controller. If you use this option then this hack will interfere with that.
You can set the attribute as Display Only by clicking the icon then when a customer tries to add it to the cart zen cart prevents it with a bright notice at the top.
So all we need to do is alter the language file to say “you picked and out of stock item” rather than “you picked an invalid item” and bobs your uncle!

So here’s how to change the language file:

Open includes\languages\english.php
Search for define(’TEXT_INVALID_SELECTION’,’ You picked an Invalid Selection: ‘); around line 453 in 1.3.7
Replace the wording you want i.e. define(’TEXT_INVALID_SELECTION’,’ You picked an Out of Stock Item: ‘);

You can also change the layout a little in includes\classes\shopping_cart.php
Look for $the_list .= TEXT_ERROR_OPTION_FOR . around line 1569 in 1.3.7 and change the stuff after it to how you want (make sure you know what you are doing before editing this bit).

You can also change the background colour and text of the error by changing the messageStackCaution class in your stylesheet.css file.

An here is a screen shot of how I’ve made mine look on one of my shops Funky Petz:

BubbleShare: Share photos – Thanksgivingtime!

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.