One more tip if using the SearchEngine friendly URL SEO Addon, add following to robots.txt file
Disallow: /index.php
Disallow: /*?
This helps to prevent duplicate content + content dilution, which will effect page ranking. The last dissallow will prevent indexing for query string (this prevents indexing for all sort by options, sign-in, register etc), which on category pages can result in same content being indexed many times (for various sort combinations this can result in same page indexed 10 times).
#1 - I keep hearing this. But an H1 tag is a formatting method. It is not intended to describe a whole page, but rather a section. Multiple h1 tags should indicate that there are multiple sections to the page (like chapters). I can see where engines might want to assume there would be 1 tag per page, but it's not correct. What happens when they index a book or magazine article that properly has multiple h1 tags on the same physical page…?
Can you point to a document or other source for this information? I'm very interested to learn facts, but not so interested in folklore (not implying anything, but it just doesn't make sense to be sensitive to 1 tag out of hundreds). A block can quite viably be considered a different section of a document.
#5 can easily be addressed by adding a rel=“nofollow” attribute the the anchor tag used. The engines will then ignore any text within that tag.
All the rest are user-controlled content issues. The trouble I find is that most clients are unwilling to spend the time to do the above work to improve their results. They look for automated solutions that can update the meta-data automatically.
One thing I think you left off that I believe is valid (though I don't know the fact source). That is the code to content ratio. Most tags (div, anchor, span, p, etc.) have content between the opening and closing tag. When embedded styles are used or many “levels” of formatting tags, the ratio of actual content to code is very low. I.e.
Hello world
Hello world: 2 words, 11 character.
The formatting is (I'm not going to count) but it's much bigger.
To get to the "content", the engines have to parse through all the opening tags in order to get to the closing tag for the content. They give points for not having to do that or having it be "shallow" rather than "deep". If all the formatting (like the above) is not really adding any changes, then the page speed is going to be slower too since the browser has to parse all that useless information.
So merchants should use classes wherever possible for formatting. Search engines only look for the 'display' attribute in classes (detecting where someone may be trying to hide links with display:none) in CSS that I'm aware of.
[quote]
Disallow: /index.php
Disallow: /*?
[/quote]
Why would you NOT want to index the home page?
Almost all of the links for login, search and other “redundant or non-useful” areas of the site for search engines have already been amended with rel=“nofollow” attributes.
Need to be careful with the 2nd Disallow. There are some elements of the site which may not have SEO names associated with it like news articles which one really does want to be indexed.
Great to be having these discussions. I don't think I'd ever Disallow my home page though. That's where we describe what we're about as well as the key products/features we want to bring people's attention to.
Disallow: /index.php
The index.php is also the domain root page, so robots will still crawl home page.
Without above disallow, robot will crawl / and index.php
Disallow: /*?
Prevents indexing for all sort by options, sign-in, register. The individual news pages have SEO names and are not effected (all SEO news pages also appear in the sitemap.xml). So this will only only prevent news view all (all individual news articles glued together), which is duplicated content. Though if you really want news view all crawled then you could add the following above the disallow:
allow: /index.php?dispatch=news.list
The news pages do have problems with duplicate mete descriptions, no simple way to fix this.
With reference to H1 header tags, many articals about H1 and SEO. Below is a link to one of many websites, many SEO specialists and consultants seem to recommend ony H1 describing the page content.
webdesign.about.com/od/seo/a/why_use_h1_for_seo.htm
You can try this SEO tool, to generate a quick SEO report:
AboutUs
Just type your website in the search box, robot will then analyze.
well i dont think CSS validation is the problem.
Haven't spent too much time looking through the forums, but what seems to be lacking in the SEO department is easy customization. Even if you KNOW how to customize it, it is a major pain in the ass as there are only the manual per-page SEO options and the overall Product Page options, and nothing in between. What if you have vendors, will they have to do it manually too? Not a good solution. The SEO Add-on needs options like this:
Product MEta Title: %product_name% | %category%| …etc
Product Meta Description : %product_name%. %product_description%. %product_features%.
Category Meta Title: etc etc
Content Page Title: etc
All of these pages need to be able to have dynamic variables in them so you can set this once for all products and categories. Maybe I'm missing something if this is already possible?
[quote name=‘totomobile’ timestamp=‘1315776509’ post=‘121464’]
Haven’t spent too much time looking through the forums, but what seems to be lacking in the SEO department is easy customization. Even if you KNOW how to customize it, it is a major pain in the ass as there are only the manual per-page SEO options and the overall Product Page options, and nothing in between.
…
[/quote]
Cs-cart automatically generates title and description from the product name and short description. You only need to enter the SEO fields manually if you want to overwrite these.
So it actually works exactly like you want it to work 
I think what he's asking for is the ability to customize what goes into which based on a variable-like syntax. I.e. he would like the ability to have the cart automatically generate data as it does now, but to be able to specify what that content is.
[quote name='Flow' timestamp='1315850045' post='121520']
automatically generates
[/quote]
This is actually the problem, automatic = no user control. I've managed to hack away at the title tags to give them a bit more meaning. Maybe this will be useful for someone.
In index.tpl:
replace
{if $page_title}
{$page_title|escape:"html"}
{else}
{foreach from=$breadcrumbs item=i name="bkt"}
{if !$smarty.foreach.bkt.first}{$i.title|unescape|strip_tags|escape:"html"}{if !$smarty.foreach.bkt.last} :: {/if}{/if}
{/foreach}
{if !$skip_page_title}{if $breadcrumbs|count > 1} - {/if}{$location_data.page_title|escape:"html"}{/if}
{/if}
with
{if $page_title}
{$page_title|escape:"html"}
{else}
{foreach from=$breadcrumbs|@array_reverse item=i name="bkt"}
{if !$smarty.foreach.bkt.last}{$i.title|unescape|strip_tags|escape:"html"} - {/if}
{/foreach}
{$location_data.page_title|escape:"html"}
{/if}
This will reverse the order of your site titles to appear like so:
My product name - category name - Site title
or in the case of a regular content page
My content page title - Site title
I'm not sure if this affects google ranking or not, but as a user doing a google search it's usually more convinient to see the product name first not somewhere near the end.
thanks
T
[font=“Verdana”]Really great feedback guys!
Thanks for providing info about your experience and history about SEO… (I clicked thanks 5+ times! )
If anyone has solved this completely, so that it offers a fully functional and flexible SEO alternative add-on, then I would be VERY keen to lean more!
Thanks again! 
[/font]
[quote name='totomobile' timestamp='1316398503' post='121881']
This is actually the problem, automatic = no user control. I've managed to hack away at the title tags to give them a bit more meaning. Maybe this will be useful for someone.
In index.tpl:
replace
{if $page_title}
{$page_title|escape:"html"}
{else}
{foreach from=$breadcrumbs item=i name="bkt"}
{if !$smarty.foreach.bkt.first}{$i.title|unescape|strip_tags|escape:"html"}{if !$smarty.foreach.bkt.last} :: {/if}{/if}
{/foreach}
{if !$skip_page_title}{if $breadcrumbs|count > 1} - {/if}{$location_data.page_title|escape:"html"}{/if}
{/if}
with
{if $page_title}
{$page_title|escape:"html"}
{else}
{foreach from=$breadcrumbs|@array_reverse item=i name="bkt"}
{if !$smarty.foreach.bkt.last}{$i.title|unescape|strip_tags|escape:"html"} - {/if}
{/foreach}
{$location_data.page_title|escape:"html"}
{/if}
This will reverse the order of your site titles to appear like so:
My product name - category name - Site title
or in the case of a regular content page
My content page title - Site title
I'm not sure if this affects google ranking or not, but as a user doing a google search it's usually more convinient to see the product name first not somewhere near the end.
thanks
T
[/quote]
Thanks for the modification for the page title. I too find it much better to have the product name first. The only issue I have is that my title tag now has phantom tab characters in between the title components causing the title to be spaced out quite a bit. Any idea why that might be happening?
Thanks,
Henry
[font=“Verdana”]Great share Adrian!
Thank you.
However i'm finding one thing not so clear… “Then in for example Feature Products block select wrapper mainbox_simple_h3.”
Could you please explain a little more of this crucial step? What it is doing, and how to apply to everything else that uses H1 tags (and how to find what uses H1 tags!)?
Thank you very much![/font]
To create a new wrapper you need to use the template editor, and in the folder customer/blocks/wrappers create a new file called mainbox_simple_h3.tpl
copy code from mainbox_simple.tpl and past into mainbox_simple_h3.tpl
then replace
with
and
with and save mainbox_simple_h3.tplIn the block editor you have options to select the wrapper, you should now be able to this wrapper.
You could also use h2 instead of h3, but a page generally should only have one main h1 heading.
Ahhh, that’s crystal clear now!
Thanks mate!
However, what is everyone’s fear of H2? lol
i.e. Why not use H2, as you say “But a page generally should only have one main H1 heading.”??
Then save H3 tags for sub-headings of blocks, and so on, whilst in the WYSIWYG editor?
It’s a pity the toolbar doesn’t contain those H1/2/3/4/5/6… buttons, as you have to continually switch into code view and check if it’s using an H1 tag, or, a P / SPAN tag.
Cheers!
[quote name=‘Flow’ timestamp=‘1315850045’ post=‘121520’]
Cs-cart automatically generates title and description from the product name and short description. You only need to enter the SEO fields manually if you want to overwrite these.
So it actually works exactly like you want it to work
[/quote]
Where can you set what this is? The default stuff looks like this below:
Thanks!
You set the page title and descriptions in the product detail page of the addon along with the meta data.
If you're talking about the info for the homepage or for things like checkout, etc. Go to Design/Blocks and then click the little icon next to the page (ie. Home page) that you want to adjust the meta data for.
[quote name='tbirnseth' timestamp='1327392947' post='129827']
You set the page title and descriptions in the product detail page of the addon along with the meta data.
If you're talking about the info for the homepage or for things like checkout, etc. Go to Design/Blocks and then click the little icon next to the page (ie. Home page) that you want to adjust the meta data for.
[/quote]
I see, these override the cs-cart defaults and then your custom ones will override these. Nice! Thanks!
Image Tip.
Using .GIF format for images that have only 2 to 16 colors can produce a smaller file than .jpg format.
You need to have an image editor that can convert your image to any number of palette colours.
For example, a black on white image with only vertical and lines can have a 2 colour palette.
And a Red on White image with feathered edges can look fine with 4 or 8 colours.
The size of the lossless GIF file will be smaller than the same JPG image with compression set to lower quality image.
This helps the page load faster.