I know CS Cart has some of these features, this is a list from an SEO company that is recommending we get or need these features. Can anyone confirm if these are already part of CS-Cart or if outside plugins are available?
[list]
[]Support 301 redirects to preserve search engine rankings.
[]Avoiding duplicate content and use of the canonical tag where relevant.
[]Dynamically generate search engine friendly URLs for product and content pages e.g. www.yoursite.com/category-name/product-name instead of www.yoursite.com/productdetails.aspx?pid=037012&cid=144&language=en-GB.
[]Specify and edit URLs for individual pages via the CMS – important for campaign landing pages and microsites.
[]Support RSS feeds to push out product and news announcements e.g. deal of the day.
[]Support for linking of product pages and content pages to improve internal linking – should be delivered via the Catalog Management tool or CMS.
[]Absolute positioning for text links on product list pages to ensure the first link for each product is keyword rich.
[]Creation of dynamic XML sitemaps which can be submitted on a regular basis.
[]Auto generated HTML sitemaps based on your catalogue and site structure.
[]Support for rich snippets within platform – encoding of data in RDF format e.g. customer ratings & reviews.
[]Custom 404 error page creation and automated reporting to flag error pages so your internal team can take action. (You can achieve this through a separate monitoring tool such as the free Indiabook.com dead link checker)
[]A Robots.txt file is provided and you can access and edit when required.
[]Capabilities for meta content (title, description) management that can be edited easily from within the CMS.
[]Machine readable text links in navigation, not images; if coders are using sIFR (flash replacements) require clarification on how this is being done to ensure it complies with accessibility standards.
[]Keyword optimized Hx tags within HTML for headings – structure for use of H1 to H6 to provide a relevant hierarchy of content.
[]Ensuring Flash objects are search engine friendly. Remember, use Flash to accentuate but not to dominate the user experience.
[] Graceful degradation – when elements like JavaScript are disabled in the browser, be sure that key content is still visible to search engine spiders/bots as well as to visitors.
[]Page builds must be efficient and not negatively impact page load time. Be sure you define how load speed is measured e.g. after all page elements have loaded – this factor is a key part of Google’s algorithm.
[]Site search capabilities. While you’re at it, enable your analytics package to pull site search usage and query data. Google Analytics makes this very easy.
[]Ability to add NoFollow, NoIndex tags to links.
[/list]
The quick answer is yes.
There are addons for the Rich Snippets, canonical URLs, and Deal of the Day. As far as I know, you have to manually do the 301 redirects in the .htaccess, but that isn't a big deal. Beyond that, I believe everything else is built in and easy to use.
Thanks,
Brandon
Thanks Brandon! I appreciate the quick response! I have seen several add-ons, can you recommend any off the top of your head?
The Rich Snippets addon by Alt-Team is great. I also have the canonical URLs addon my CS-Cart Rocks. I'm not exactly sure how this one works though. I also used to have the Deal of the Day addon by Webgraphiq and it worked really great too. I just didn't use it very often, so I didn't bother upgrading it when I did my site upgrade.
Thanks,
Brandon
As Brandon has said, the only thing you'll need outwith the default CS-Cart package is the Alt Team and CS-Cart Rocks addons. There is still WebGraphiq's Deal of the Day with Alerts, which is adequate, but lately I've been opting for CartTuning's version which is much more pleasing to the eye without requiring any further styling unlike the (imo) outdated appeal of the former.
You'll also need to create more than one wrapper, I tend to create an extra 5, so I can use
,
, etc, effectively. As default, there is only one “Mainbox General” and “Mainbox Important” which both generate the title in
tags.
That's it. CS-Cart is pretty SEO friendly once a few tweaks are applied. You'll find them on this forum as well as by a few addon developers. As SEO with ecommerce is virtually a necessity unless you want to throw all your cash at CPA/CPC advertising, it's rather astounding that CS-Cart have not integrated at least canonical and redirect handling into the software.
Rich content/schema looks to be the way forward with Google so CS-Cart should act now, not after the fact.
Thanks again guys, very good advice and very helpful!
Jacson