Zen Cart Tips and Tricks

One of the problems I find with e-commerce sites is it’s difficult to get chunks of content for search engines to get a hold off.  E-commerce sites tend to be product images, one liner product titles, with the best opportunity of getting any real keyword-rich content being the product description or category description. It’s important to have good product & category descriptions, not just for search engines, but your customers as well.

I’ll talk about product descriptions in a separate post, but for now I want to concentrate on your category pages. One of the benefit of optimising your category pages is it gives you a better chance of a search engine landing your visitors on a more relevant page than just your home page.

Optimising your category pages will give search engines more to chew on and increasing the chance of your category pages showing up for relevant search terms within the engines.

To begin with you will need to come up with a short paragraph to place at the top of  each of your category pages . You can add this text in by going to your admin pages > Catalog > Categories/ Products. Click the “e” to edit a category. Type or paste your text into the Categories Description box.

Make sure the text you have written has your main keyword for that category near the beginning of your first sentence and put it in bold. Also make sure it has your keyword in more than once, but don’t over do it. It has to read as natural as possible to get the best results. You can use this block of text to try and get other keywords you know people will search for. For example if you are optimising for handbags you can try to work in other good related keywords like “leather handbags” or “designer handbags”. Once you get into it you’ll be surprised how easy it is to do. Just remember not to stuff the keyword in to often and make sure it sounds natural.

Let’s give an example. Lets say you are selling graphic cards. You have your category and products setup. Now in the category description we might have:

Check out our wide range of graphics cards. From Nvidia graphics cards to Ati graphics cards your sure to find what your looking for. Whether you are a gamer or just a novice PC user we can help you get the right graphics card for your computer.

So you can see we have our main keyword in bold then a few long tail keyword with the two main brands of graphics cards nvidia and ATI. It can/ should be longer, just remember the long it is the more it pushes the product/ sub-category listings down the page. It’s also worth trying to get plural and singular versions of your keyword in.

It’s also important that you come up with unique text for each category. If you use the same paragraph with just different keywords then it’s won’t have as much of an effect on search engines.

The next step requires a plug-in to be installed, but it’s a great way to get more text on the category pages without getting in the way of you products. The plug-in is Short Description for Categories. When you install this plug-in it will allow you to add a second description underneath the product/ sub-category listing.

Once installed you will notice a second category description box when you edit a category. It’s here where we can really put some jucy keyword rich text:

Think of 3-4 keywords other than the main category keyword. Then create your paragraphs for each one. The only difference with these descriptions to the first one is you want to put H2 headings in before each paragraph, if we take our graphics card example (click image below):

Again, you have to remember to make it read a natural as possible and don’t put the keyword in too often.

If the category you are editing has sub-categories rather than product listed, you can put the the sub-category titles in the H2 tag. Write your paragraph as normal, but in the last sentence add a link to the sub-category you are writing about. The link text MUST be the keyword:

Now when you go to the front end of the site the descriptions with look like this:

This extra text, structured in this way, will really help your ranking in the search engines. It’s also worth experimenting with different keywords and even changing some of the descriptions all together from time to time. If you want to maximise the look and effect here are some top tips for you:

• Don’t do more than 4-5 little paragraphs. It more you have the more it will dilute the keyword strength on the page.
• The top description will be seen by your visitors so make sure it makes sense and isn’t just written for SEO.
• Try, where possible, to use plurals and singular versions of your keyword.
• If you write your paragraphs out in MS Word (or other word processes) you can check your text for spelling errors.
• Make sure if you have use a word processor to write your descriptions copy from your processor to notepad then copy the text from notepad into the Zen Cart description boxes. Doing this will strip any unwanted html tags.
• You can reduce the space that the bottom description takes up with a bit of CSS wizardry. Add the following code to the bottom of your stylesheet.css file and it will place the description inside a scrollable box:

• #categoryDescriptionSub {
  height: 100px;
  overflow: scroll;
  margin: 10px 0px;
  }

• Move the second description under the what’s new, featured, specials boxes so the second description is the last thing in the centre column.
  To do this open includes\templates\<YOUR TEMPLATE FOLDER>\templates\tpl_index_categories.php
  In there find the following code:

  • <?php
    // categories_description_sub
    if ($current_categories_description_sub != ”) {
    ?>
    <a name=”descSub”></a>
    <div id=”categoryDescriptionSub” class=”catDescContent”><?php echo $current_categories_description_sub;  ?></div>
    <?php } // categories_description_sub ?>

  • Cut that code and make a new line above the last <div> and paste the code in to that line.
• Do the same for includes\templates\<YOUR TEMPLATE FOLDER>\templates\tpl_index_product_list.php
• Do not try to hide this text. Either by changing the colour of the text to the background colour or making the css box hight to 1. You will get penalised by search engines.
• Only make the first keyword in each paragraph bold.
• Enter a title for links. When you add a link to the sub-categories, Zen Cart gives you an option to put a title (tooltip). Enter the keyword in this box.
• Remove the “more info” link from under the top description.
  • In  includes\templates\<YOUR TEMPLATE FOLDER>\templates\tpl_index_categories.php find:
  • echo ‘<a id=”descSubLink” href=”‘ . zen_href_link(FILENAME_DEFAULT, ‘cPath=’ . $cPath) . ‘#descSub” >’ . CATEGORIES_SUB_TEXT . ‘</a>’;
  • and delete it.
  • do the same for includes\templates\<YOUR TEMPLATE FOLDER>\templates\tpl_index_product_list.php
• Experiment! Find different keywords to use by using the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion tool.

That’s pretty much it. I know if you have a large site it can be quite a lot of work, but you won’t regret it. The more categories you do this on and the better your keyword research the bigger the reward.