{"id":373,"date":"2011-02-05T11:34:53","date_gmt":"2011-02-05T16:34:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deliawilsondesign.com\/blog\/?p=373"},"modified":"2012-09-30T07:42:26","modified_gmt":"2012-09-30T12:42:26","slug":"how-zen-cart-rates-for-seo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wiztech4zc.com\/blog\/how-zen-cart-rates-for-seo\/","title":{"rendered":"How Zen Cart Rates for SEO"},"content":{"rendered":"

Practical Ecommerce’s article about how to rate a shopping cart’s SEO effectiveness<\/a> automatically started me thinking about how Zen Cart rates. Nowadays it’s a rare cart owner who doesn’t worry about this and I’m constantly explaining how Zen Cart works. So I’ll take Practical Ecommerce’s points and score each of them in Zen Cart as ready, some tweaking, and needs work.<\/p>\n

The good news is that Zen Cart has a number of automated functions that work well in a default setup.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So the list below includes 11 readies, 2 tweaking and only 2 needs work. Only one in the\u00a0 needs work category – the ability to edit image alt tags –\u00a0 do I consider to be a Zen Cart weakness.<\/p>\n

The Googlebot SEO basics.
\n<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The title tag and description both are part of setting up the cart and you can tweak those to your heart’s content. You can also edit meta tags per product. Score: ready<\/strong> x 2<\/p>\n

Good Googlebot site structure.<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Custom URLs – can be done by installing an SEO package and there are several choices.\u00a0 Score: some tweaking by use of add ons.<\/strong>
\nI recommend CEON URI Mapping (SEO)<\/a> because it allows you to tweak the page names without changing the page \/ product titles.<\/p>\n

Navigation, breadcrumbs – automatic breadcrumbs, choices of navigation. Score: ready<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sitemap. Score: ready<\/strong><\/p>\n

High volume of quality content.<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Update content. Score: ready<\/strong><\/p>\n

Anchor text. Score: ready<\/strong><\/p>\n

Alt attributes for images. Score: needs work<\/strong>
\nThe biggest drawback for SEO in Zen Cart is no ability to alter the alt tags for category and products images.\u00a0 Images inserted into content don’t have that problem.<\/p>\n

Edit header tags. Score: ready<\/strong><\/p>\n

(Zen Cart includes a WYSIWYG editor for content and can be edited to your heart’s content.)<\/p>\n

Make sure site is \u201ceasy to crawl.”<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Control user generated content. Score: ready<\/strong>
\nThe only thing in Zen Cart that applies is the product reviews and it is set up as an automatic robot skip to start with.<\/p>\n

Allow robots.txt file. Score: ready<\/strong>
\nSample file is included in installation but it needs editing and renaming. But the metatags language file already includes a list of the pages that should not be indexed so robots.txt would be be for further tweaking of those settings.<\/p>\n

Allow mobile visitors Score: ready <\/strong>
\nSure you can access a zen cart site on a mobile device- just like most websites\u00a0 but there are fixed widths for side columns in a table\u00a0 so it’s not a user friendly way to view a shopping cart. Pretty normal for ecommerce sites though.<\/p>\n

Mobile friendly urls Score: needs work<\/strong>
\nNothing inherent in Zen Cart but it’s actually not that difficult to create a mobile site in addition to the main site using the same database.<\/p>\n

Proper site promotion<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Rss feeds. Score: some tweaking<\/strong>
\nNot included in default install but various add-ons exist.<\/p>\n

Social media integration Score: ready
\n<\/strong>Various mods exist as well as there are many ways to integrate social media and a number of easy solutions for any cart owner.<\/p>\n

Author: Delia Wilson Lunsford, Founder & CEO, WizTech, Inc. <\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Practical Ecommerce’s article about how to rate a shopping cart’s SEO effectiveness automatically started me thinking about how Zen Cart rates. Nowadays it’s a rare cart owner who doesn’t worry about this and I’m constantly explaining how Zen Cart works. So I’ll take Practical Ecommerce’s points and score each of them in Zen Cart as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-zen-cart","category-zen-cart-seo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wiztech4zc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wiztech4zc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wiztech4zc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wiztech4zc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wiztech4zc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/wiztech4zc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":806,"href":"https:\/\/wiztech4zc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373\/revisions\/806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wiztech4zc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wiztech4zc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wiztech4zc.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}