Seo Add-On Preferred Settings

Business Marketing & SEO
1

Hello,



Starting a new site, and would like to know everyone’s feedback on the default SEO Add-on settings before things get too far along.







Is there a reason I wouldn’t just want for products the product name and skip the category/subcategory, etc…that way if a product moves category over time it doesn’t need a redirect etc?



Any feedback is appreciated, thanks.

2

site.com/product-name.html is more concise also.

3

No one buys a category so as Louis said, just use site/product.html for products (no reference to category). You probably want the full path for categories. I.e. site.com/cat1/subcat1/subcat2

4

[quote name='tbirnseth' timestamp='1410046670' post='191612']

No one buys a category so as Louis said, just use site/product.html for products (no reference to category). You probably want the full path for categories. I.e. site.com/cat1/subcat1/subcat2

[/quote]



Thank you both for the feedback, can you explain why /product.html is preferred over just /product which seems cleaner?

5

I prefer a clean URL without .html. Check out those top SEO websites. Most of them adopt URLs without the .html extension. There must be a reason.


  1. URLs without extension looks more friendly, hence more click-through rate.
  2. Less chance for URL errors
  3. No problems migrating URLs if you change language or platform in the future.
6

Using the html suffix differentiates an end point (product) with a mid-point (category for ecommerce).

It doesn't matter whether you use the .html suffix or not as long as you're consistent with use in your site. But it does tell the user that it is an endpoint versus a listing page.



There are so few “points” applied to the URL for SEO that it's not even worth arguing about. SEO URLs is really a misnomer for user friendly urls. The search engines could really care less what the URL is (as long as it's not in the query string). They are interested in content, content and content. The advantage of “SEO URLs” in cs-cart is that the alternative is to specify the pages via a QUERYSTRING (dispatch=pages.view&page_id=13&if_you_understand_this=genius) which is much harder for a search engine to determine which parameters are really part of the url and which are options.



Secondarily, they are interested in your “links in” from reliable and publicly active sites not within your domain (I.e. lots of visitors). If you can do well in both those areas, then all the rest really becomes noise. Use webmaster tools to see what Google sees as your key words (based on your content) versus what you think. Change the content of your pages to get the key words you want (and if using adwords, are willing to pay for).

7

Very helpful, thank you!