Hi guys

Are there any pulgins available to make the ZEN Cart URLS SEO friendly?

Many thanks

I saw that nobody answered your thread so I did a little research. :rolleyes: I am anti-dynamic everything and I am certainly not an authority on this type of thing. Perhaps others can join us in this thread and we could probably make for an interesting discussion.

It doesn't appear to be much you can do with the software to make it more SEO friendly. There are some "framework" templates that seem to be available, but they wouldn't neccessarily solve your SEO issues. Appears like the ZEN Cart solution is intended to be user friendly and somewhat visitor friendly, but carries little consideration regarding the SEs, this is typical of automated software and other page coding generators. Anything that automatically generates pages dynamically is difficult to program effectively, although there are exceptions. ZEN Cart requires a complete redevelopment in order to provide better SEO final pages.

You know that you can always modify the output pages yourself in a HTML editor to clean up the sloppy, error-filled final HTML, one at a time, just like the olden days. You'll probably have to save them one at a time from the Web though. I got stuck doing this once and tried for six months to clean it up and get it up in the rankings, unsuccessfully. What a nightmare, scrapped it in the end and started the client's project from scratch.

Incidentally, the SEs tell us that they prefer content to be original and uniquely created, although they seem to perform otherwise.

I know this is an old thread, but since the last poster went on a total tangent, I've taken the initiative to post a solution to the original question.

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Zen cart friendly URLs are very possible with a few basic script modifications and an appropriate .htaccess file with apache mod_rewrite rules. Take a look at this URL for more information on how to get this done: http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?ma...roducts_id=231

There are actually 3 modules for rewriting Zen Cart urls available for free.

Ceon - http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?ma...oducts_id=1269

USEO - http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?ma...roducts_id=231

Simple SEO - http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?ma...oducts_id=1013

The latter Simple SEO is the newest and has the best author support.

~Melanie