More and more people are using osCommerce for their business websites. This is a great system that allows for almost complete automation of your website business, from traffic building to order completion. However, most users do not realize that they need to do some search engine optimization and fine tuning on their osCommerce websites in order to gain enough traffic to turn over a profit.
When most experts write about search engine optimization they are writing for a specific target audience, and it is not the business owner. In fact, most of the reading available on this topic is geared toward those who use their websites to make money through affiliate marketing and Google AdWords. However, osCommerce SEO is equally important.
OsCommerce search engine optimization is somewhat different from informative or link filled websites. Since you are selling products, your optimization must come from keyword rich product descriptions, an informative about page containing specific industry phrases, and metatags. These can be more difficult to write than informative keyword rich articles.
Be careful that you do not get carried away when writing your product descriptions, however. You do not want to simply string together a bunch of keywords and phrases that describe your product. Make the product description interesting, and keep it at around three sentences in length. You should only use your keyword phrase once or twice within these short paragraphs.
Your about page is the most helpful section of your website for osCommerce SEO. This is the area where you can write some informative and keyword rich content. You still want to keep it interesting, and you likely will not have a very long about page. However, you can probably manage several occurrences of your targeted keyword and industry phrases within this section; it is recommended that you keep this at around three percent keyword density.
The biggest help you can give your search engine optimization is through the use of osCommerce customization. Many users neglect to do much with the metatags that are preset for these websites. However, through customization you can easily change these metatags to more search engine friendly tags.
Among the osCommerce customization that you should check into are title tags, description tags, keyword tags, and the actual web address of your site. Your website title and your web address should contain a keyword or industry phrase related to the products sold on your site. Your description tag should include several keywords and phrases that relate to your site, in a well written manner. You keyword tag should contain every keyword and industry phrase placed anywhere on your website.
To further your osCommerce SEO, you can add a metatag called the “Google Bot” tag. This tag tells the web crawler for Google how often to crawl your website. The more often your website is crawled, the more likely that your search engine ranking will go up. If you do not include this type of tag, the web crawler may take several months to crawl your website before you ever get listed in the search pages at all.
