Which is the best shopping cart for SEO
Ajay Kumar Singh on June 28th, 2009While choosing the best eCommerce shopping cart for online business website people often ignore the SEO while focusing more on the features being offered by the shopping cart. When they have completed the shopping cart installation, configuration and try to promote the online shop then only they will realize that they are in trouble waters as shopping carts are notoriously bad for the SEO.
So what one should look into the shopping cart Search Engine Optimization? This article investigates some of the most popular shopping carts and their SEO capabilities.
There are plenty of online shopping carts some are free some are shareware and others are commercial "out of Box" and their number is increasing day by day which makes it difficult to narrow down on the most suitable shopping cart.
I will describe the most popular shopping carts and their capabilities with the SEO, all of these are based on php/mySQL.
osCommerce
osCommerce remains my favorite and the best shopping cart to work with not only in terms of setting it up, configuring but also for the SEO. osCommerce is, undoubtedly the best shopping cart for the SEO.
The osCommerce SEO contribution – osCommerce: Ultimate SEO URLs, freely and publicly available, is not well capable of providing the full features for SEO. It requires tweaking to make it a perfect tool to utilize the full potential of SEO.
CRE Loaded
CRE Loaded, the offspring of osCommerce and free (well almost) script, also offers SEO capabilities but it is limited and tweaking to make it works is little difficult, if not impossible, than that for osCommerce SEO. Since CRE Loaded is more or less becoming a commercial script the free contributions are becoming rare which makes it further difficult to customize for SEO.
Zen Cart
Zen Cart, another popular free shopping cart and similar to osCommerce, also offers the SEO friendly URLs capability however customizing it further is a difficult task as it is based on Smarty.
X-cart
X-Cart is a licensed shopping cart. It provides the full SEO capabilities and options to change the Metatags and description for each product.
digiShop
digiShop, the commercial shopping cart, offers to enable mod_rewrite in the new version (version 5.3.0) however making it work fully for SEO is not easy task and requires digiShop expert to handle it. If not configured properly digishop SEO module can harm your website for SEO. digiShop SEO mod_rewrite module rebuilds the shopping cart in HTML while keeping the php version of it intact and it requires further tweaking to make it work fully.
CubeCart
CubeCart is an “out of box” commercial shopping cart, the latest version of CubeCart offers SEO capabilities.
Avactis
Avactis is a commercial php/mySQL based shopping cart, it does offer some SEO capabilities.
err am i missing something or is this really an article about search friendly urls? Google now spiders querystring based urls so url rewriting is not 100% necessary any more..
ive worked with the xcart team to make the new version seo friendly (most to be implimented) and i can confidently say that managing deleted products, duplication and indexing are the main issue for seo based carts NOT url rewriting, thats so 2003 dude!
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Ajay Kumar Singh Reply:
July 9th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
yes you missed everything. It is not about Google indesing the dynamic files. It is about Search Engine friendly URLs and not to mention User Friendly too.
Topic doesn’t stop to just URLs. It is also about the title tag and metatags support in the various shopping carts.
Yes it is true most of the shopping carts are not making the SEO friendly features inbuilt but still there is no match for osCommerce in terms of flexibility.
Cheers it is 2009
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both of my comments didnt post
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it is posted, so what you wanted to say?
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A “best shopping cart” post that doesn’t even mention Magento?
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Ajay Kumar Singh Reply:
July 16th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Well I never tried Magento even though I see a lot of hype going on about Magento.
I just happened to glance through its FREE features and found that most of the basic features are missing.
In future if Magento comes out to be more feature rich then I would try it.
The list is based on my own personal experience with the shopping carts.
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We use cubecart and have added a custom search engine friendly mod from rukispot. It works great and we are in the top three organic search positions on Google (with product/brand specific keyworks), no1 on msn/bing and yahoo.
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I use Avactis cart, it is very fast shopping cart
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