X-Cart and SEO

Posted by Marko | Filed under Uncategorized

For the past week I have been working on reskining an online shopping cart which is powered by X-Cart and thus far has been coming along pretty well other then the fact that there are so many includes. I am converting the whole shopping cart to a CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) layout to speed up the load time, be better optimized for the mighty search engines and to allow easier site wide changes. I was surprised to see the stock cart had no hierarchy in the structure of the content as far as H1’s, H2’s etc… I was expecting a little more for my $200 but none the less I will add those simple SEO changes to it. After the design and layout are buttoned up I want to clean up those nasty URL’s and get them at least somewhat SEO friendly. I was thinking do some HTACCESS magic and get some keywords in those URL’s. Anyone got any tricks they care to share?

I began reskinging Oscommerce before switching over to X-Cart and learned real fast that its whole structure was a bit questionable. The load time of the whole store took way too long for any average web user and the simple fact that I had to create my own way of password protecting the admin area made me question its security. I guess I should of have known better then to go open source for something so important…

{democracy:7}

Permalink | February 12th, 2007

6 Responses to “X-Cart and SEO”

  1. Andrei Says:
    March 6th, 2007 at 4:40 am MyAvatars 0.2

    I am for X-cart. It is very good software. About SEO - native skin is quite good for it. Smarty makes template modification very simple and convenient :)

    IMO OSC is headache for SEO experts.



  2. Benj Arriola Says:
    April 29th, 2007 at 5:23 pm MyAvatars 0.2

    Interesting reply.

    There are some good OSC tableless templates. And there are OSC extensions for Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs, a sitemap.xml extension, and an extension for social bookmarking.

    OSC has several extensions to use to make it more Search Engine Friendly.

    I’m still for OSC or Zen Cart. Zen Cart is a modification of OSC but uses more tableless CSS than OSC.



  3. Andrei Says:
    May 7th, 2007 at 11:54 pm MyAvatars 0.2

    Yea, there are good CSS-driven templates for OSC, but really good ones are not free, and cost significant money. :)
    So, I think that at this point of view X-Cart would be “near to best” solution.

    imho



  4. Eugene Says:
    August 22nd, 2007 at 1:42 am MyAvatars 0.2

    I am for X-Cart. It uses Smarty template engine, so html is apart of php code and so easy to modify. Please check the templates we offer and say what you think of the design:
    http://x-cart-customization.com/shop/



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    August 28th, 2007 at 7:37 am MyAvatars 0.2

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  6. Rosina Says:
    October 4th, 2008 at 8:01 am MyAvatars 0.2

    Thank for making this valuable information available to the public.



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