Anyone spending anytime at all on the Zen Cart forum can certainly see the huge buzz about SEO urls. So lets get you the information to make an informed decision about whether or not you should use SEO urls for your Zen Cart shop.
Zen Cart’s product pages are really pretty good out of the gate. So in the beginning when time is short and there’s much to do, you might consider starting your on page SEO with category and product index pages. These pages tend to have a bit broader content than product pages, yet more targeted than your main page… Makes them perfect landing pages if optimized well.
Writing content or copy so to speak has to be the things we find most shop owners dislike the most. Fact is among the core and tasks associated with running your online this is likely the single most important. We hear all kinds of reasoning (excuses), but the bottom line is that creating proper content for your Zen Cart is NOT that difficult.
This came up recently for a client and I thought I would share. While Zen Cart has no ability to change this in its administration, the trundicated fields for your product and category titles are easily changed in the database. I would rank this task at the high beginner level.
Many shop owners have prices set just under a whole number, for example $9.99 instead of $10.00 or $89.95 instead of $90.00 . Most people assume that this is done because the price seems lower to the visiting consumer. However, this is not the reason this product pricing practice started.The practice of setting prices just below the whole number was initiated to ensure that the sales clerk had to open the till and give proper change for each transaction, thus recording the sale and preventing him/her from pocketing the cash.
Not going to re post this, but here is our Simple PCI Guide for Merchants. All Zen Cart owners should by now be PCI DSS compliant and this is a common sense guide to get you started on the road to compliance if you are not. Understand, you cannot afford to process credit cards and NOT be PCI compliant…. and your compliance is not optional in any way. This applies to every Zen Cart, anywhere which is accepting credits cards on site. Those using PayPal offsite, 2 checkout and other payment services need only worry that their processor is compliant.
Everyone is still buzzing and awaiting the Beta release of Zen Cart 2.0. The thread to subscribe to is here if you want updates and release information.That aside, we are going to get in to some details regarding the brave new Zen cart release of 2.0 in 2009 with the information we currently have and will update as we can.
In the world of ecommerce marketing, shopping feeds and comparison shopping sites are a large part of the marketing you will do. Zen Cart luckily has some great modules for integrating and generating the feeds for these traffic providing shopping sites.
“We are much more emotionally attached to products for which we feel some involvement. So true personalization and customization makes a real difference.”
Creativity.
