Zen Cart Tips and Tricks

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….

When people search for your site (via the organic listings) they are very often taken to your home page and not the page that contains the items they are after.
For example I know if a customer searches for rabbit hutches for my site he or she will be sent to my homepage. Which might not be a major problem, but after analysing my stats a lot of people hit that front page then don’t go any further. One way I’ve tried to ‘encourage’ customers to browse to what they are after is to add links to popular section at the top of my categories, which has helped, but after further analysis I notice a lot of people just used the search box.

So I came up with the idea to automatically add the search term into the search box, if a customer comes from a search engine. That way they will see the keyword and just have to click ’search’. They will then get a list of all the products they are looking for.

The pic below shows a heat map of my site BEFORE I added this little change. A heat map tells you where your customers are clicking on the site. It a good way to test layouts and new content. Crazy Egg have a free heatmap tool, although if you have a lot of hits you will have to pay. You can also use Google Analytics for this.

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So as you can see their are a lot of people using the search box. Putting their keyword search term in there will not only make the site more user friendly but they will get exactly what they are looking for.

Full details on how to add this function click here: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dhd8sh6f_7ggkjqz
Currently the script only works for customers coming from GOOGLE, AOL, YAHOO and MSN and I’ve only tested it on Zen Cart Version 1.3.7

I’m still gathering data, but so far more people seem to be using the search feature a lot more. I’ll give you an update at the end of the month.

Give it a whirl and let me know how it works out for you.

As some of you will agree the lack of a spell checker in Zen Cart can be frustrating. As a primarily Firefox user I’m pleased to see a spell checker has been built into the program. Internet Explorer users do not have this luxury. Unless of course you install IESpell This neat little app will install a context menu, so when you right click in an input box you get the option to check spelling. See the pics below for an example. The great thing is you can use is on any input box, not just the ones in Zen Cart.
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