Forum Moderators: buckworks
I have only found site in the top 10 that uses OSC.
[oscommerce.com...]
The more heavily promoted site does extremly well across the two and three word phrases that we want. Moreso, definitavly, then any of the vendors in our niche. The only site that I find competitive with our efforts has partnered with one of the larger search engines amoung others and has a large staff, so I would label us as very competitive.
That said - quite a bit has gone into positioning from time, monitary, and coding standpoints. The most effective stuff we have done are SE Safe urls (I wrote about it in the osc forums - this predated the mods that exist today), and a custom sitemap that descends into categories.
As long as it is good enough and addresses the SEO concerns, would you consider releasing as open-source?
Generally the problem is it addresses only my SEO concerns. The two sites operate off the same database via code that was added in a rather adhoc manner, and several of the mysql tables have grown extraneous fields that are not in stock installations.
Additionally, most of he code that addresses SEO stuff is ugly at best. I have no qualms about releasing it (rather I tend to have issues with closed source software), but have found no interested parties thus far, and do not have the time to clean it up and make it run on a stock install.
If your an interested in pursuing it further I can create a contribution for the larger of the modifications I have made (strstram post proceessing of pages per SEO specifications)
Come again? What does this mean? I'm not a programmer myself, but I think there is a great need for an eCommerce solution that can display categories and products in a search engine friendly matter with some back-end administration that can be automate some of the labor.
I'm not a programmer myself so I could not contribute even if I wanted to. ;)
<title>
<meta keywords>
<meta description>
The actual copy for the on page titles for products, product categories, and manufacturers
The HTML used to emphasize the on page title: the default uses a style rather than a <H1> or <h2> element.
The URLs which by default will display vars and SIDs.
There are two contribs that I found to be useful in getting basic control over the page elements.
This Meta Tag [oscommerce.com] contribution and this contribution for Category Descriptions [oscommerce.com]. They step on each other so after a bit of tweaking they can be made to play well with each other.
Beyond this, while I haven't actually fussed with it yet, there is a contrib for making the URLs friendly. Because the cart is modular it uses one primary page as a template for displaying categories, products, and manufacturers. SO it should be easy (yeah right..) to get this to work properly.
In addition there are a couple of mods that I have not yet installed that will publish all of the product categories and nested categories on a single page.
Another note: yes, the cart is modular so while there is a ton of code that can be paired down remember that is was built that way on purpose. The advantage of leaving the base code alone is that you can take advantage of the upgrades. The disadvantage is that it's fat: they love tables and don't have a good handle on how to use styles. Not to mention that the next major release 2.2-MS3 is imminent and will be significantly different. So while I don't recommend you stick with the osCommerce default install, realize that the more you customize it you are in fact swimming further away from the dock where someone with a life preserver can help you. That being said, I've taken to adding in comments within the code to note where I've made changes and what I changed as well as leaving a copy of the original in place commented out. The idea here is to leave it this way for a few months after the cart is published so that I can follow what I did and why when any hidden problems come up later.
(strstram post proceessing of pages per SEO specifications)Come again? What does this mean? I'm not a programmer myself, but I think there is a great need for an eCommerce solution that can display categories and products in a search engine friendly matter with some back-end administration that can be automate some of the labor.
StrStream (String Stream) refers to storing the entire output of a page as a giant string (a string is how a computer stores text) rather then outputting it as it is generated. You can then call a function to modify the string, in my case do stuff such as find <title>...</title> and replace it with stuff more suitable then the default entries.
OsCommerce is not well templetized in the sense that extensive changes to page templates (where page headers are generated) need be duplicated across ~30 some odd pages (this is not true forr all changes but certainly is for page headers). String Streams let you modify a single line of the code in application_top and application_bottom to call a single (custom written) function, rather then modifying it in the 30 or so pages.
The function I use to process stuff is constructed in a manner that allows me to define one or more phrases I want a page to be optimized for rather then what the elements of a page should contain. It uses the first phrase most frequently and if addl phrases are defined it uses them less frequently.
Basically the function does a database lookup. If the page it is generating has a corresponding database entry then it uses (up to 4) short phrases to generate Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords an H1 Page Title (stock osc does not use h1 for page title), and optionally image alts, table summarys, and anchor titles. For the headers it combines the phrases until it hits lengths set at an arbitrary value dependant upon headers. For instance if the databasse contains
pri_phrase_1=>"red widget"
pri_phrase_2=>"useful widget"
sec_phrase_1=>"widget for business"
sec_phrase_2=>"office widget"
keywords=>"...widget related keywords..."
You might end up with
title=>"Red Widget"
meta description=>"Save on Red Widget including Useful Widget, Widget for Business, and Office Widget at Widgets for less"
meta keywords=>[comma seperated phrases followed by keywords]
etc...
You can tweak the lengths so dependant upon what lengths you set for various elements you could end up with something different entirly, so if for example, google decides tomorrow that it likes titles of length 8 best you can tweak this without modifying strings across the board.
For the image alts and subsequent aformentioned elements, it uses randomness to aim at certain percentage of the tags containing slight variations on the keywords (I currently have this disabled because it seemed like a good idea only until our site had some measure of results, at which point it felt entirly too spammy to have a one by one spacer with an alt reflecting our widgets. It could be made much better with some work but in nature this part of the code will always feel spammy because it is. That said, it was also very cool stufff, with somenice features such as using a different seed every two days and thus give the pages regular changes).
In essence the processing I do generates custom headers from a database in a manner that tries to ensure the least work for me - by focusing on phrases and more abstract concepts rather then titles, meta tags, and very fleeting concepts.
Additionally, the code to a large extent has suitable defaults, for instance if it is a product page it uses the product name, if in a category it uses the category name to optimize etc.
In any case I think I have talked entirly too much...
A lot of the stuff I do was most easily done via regular expressions so the strstream functions rely on a class that makes extensive use of them and was designed it in terms of the server load at the time. Nothing in the code is complicated per say, but when you combine say 20 of the most intensive string operations one could do, one heck of a large string, and larger and larger loads, it does make for a good show.
