osCommerce as I’m sure you’ll know is an extremely powerful and popular ecommerce solution however when it comes to Dental SEO (and usability) out of the box, it has a very long way to go.
One of the first things that you’ll notice is the format that the URL’s are set out as. Product pages will look something along the lines of:
product_info.php?products_id=27
And category pages will look something along the lines of:
index.php?cPath=1&osCsid=j4d680nmicer4vgrqeuv65e6n2
Luckily, the osCommerce has a huge community which allows us to change these URLs to an Dental SEO friendly format. First things first though, let’s get rid of that ugly session ID within the URL!
Login to your admin and then navigate to “Sessions” which you should find under the main heading “Configuration”. From there, you should see 7 items to configure, we’re only interested in one. See force cookie use? Set that to true. Now, hopefully, the session ID’s have now been removed from the URL.
Seems easy so far, right? As mentioned earlier, osCommerce has a huge community and one of the contributions the community has to offer is a contribution called “Ultimate Dental SEO URLs”:
https://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,2823
Basically, as the name suggests, this contribution allows you to modify your URL’s fairly easily to a new Dental SEO friendly format.
Download the latest release of the contribution and unzip it. You’ll notice a file called install which is basically all the documentation for the contribution and you’ll also notice two folders + a .txt document. Most of us won’t be too interested in the contents of the .txt document so you can safely ignore that. Upload the two folders to the root and then open up the install within your desired browser. You’ll be given 8 installation steps which are fairly easy to follow, once you’ve followed all 8 steps, it’s time to test! All your URL’s should be in an Dental SEO friendly format (you’ll notice the old format automatically redirects to the new format which is pretty neat).
With just under a quarter of a million members on the community forums, if you get stuck you’ll be sure to find help.
