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.

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.

The robot.txt file is what search engine spiders look at before indexing your site. This file tells the search engines what files and directories to ignore.

This is great to stop search engines putting pages in the index that are not needed. Like the tell a friend page or the contact us page.

If you are using the Ultimate SEO URL plug-in and zen 1.3.7 then replace the contents of your robots.exe file with the following

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /contrib/
Disallow: /docs/
Disallow: /extras/
Disallow: /htmlarea/
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /sitemap/
Disallow: /graphics/
Disallow: /login.html
Disallow: /privacy.html
Disallow: /conditions.html
Disallow: /contact_us.html
Disallow: /gv_faq.html
Disallow: /discount_coupon.html
Disallow: /unsubscribe.html
Disallow: /shopping_cart.html
Disallow: /ask_a_question.html
Disallow: /popup_image_additional.html
Disallow: /product_reviews_write.html
Disallow: /tell_a_friend.html
Disallow: /pages-popup_image.html?
Disallow: /popup_image_additional.html?
Disallow: /login.html
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

The last bit “Googlebot-Image” stops goggle from indexing your pictures into the photo search. If you want your photos in the Google photo search remove the last two lines.

Using this robots.txt file will help to prevent “diluting” your site, which may help your search engine positions.

You can easily modify this list if you are not using Ultimate SEO URLs or a different SEF urls plugin.

**Contributed by Scott** Do not add your admin folder to this list. See comments

If your hooked on the who’s online page like me you’ll love the Improved Whos Online module . It has and an additional feature that lets you set an automatic refresh page time. So when you click the 30secs button, the page automatically updates every 30 secs. So simple yet so effective.

I always have a tab open just refreshing my who’s online page. Sad? Maybe, but this page can be very useful especially if you get it to show more info than it does. Like say the referral page. So now I can not only see what my customers are up to but I can now see how they found my site! I can even click on on the link and see for my self. Who’s online just got a whole lot more useful.

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So how do we add the referral info in. Well, as always, some small core code changes and your files.
Changes include:

• additional field in whos_online database table
• code changes to:
  • includes/functions/whos_online.php
  • admin/whos_online.php

Full instructions here:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dhd8sh6f_8cfpcnp

Now you can sit there for hours looking at how people find your site. If your sad like me that is

As always let me know how you get on and if you have any further ideas about improvement.

Google release it’s checkout software in the UK a month or two ago and I couldn’t wait to get it on my site!

The Google Checkout for Zen Cart is still in it’s early development stages, but it works. And boy do my customers like it. Since adding it to my site approx 90% of customers have used Google instead of Paypal or Nochex.

It is a lot simpler for customers to use, unlike paypal which if you don’t have an account can be very confusing for the computer novice.

I recommend you get Google checkout on your site ASAP.

Full review of Google checkout coming soon….