OpenCart SEO Tips

SEO is an acronym for “Search Engine Optimization”. It is a technique that helps search engines better understand websites. The purpose of the optimization is to communicate with Google, Bing and other searches in a way that they can recommend your website for other customers. This will result in increasing visitors and more sales.

In this two series of articles we will explore the best and effective practices for proper SEO. The tips below can be easily implemented by yourself even if you are not technical guru.

Do you really need SEO?

SEO can be very useful. It doesn’t matter if you already have a successful store or just a few sales. Correctly done, optimization can boost your site visits. The more visits your store gets, the more orders you will have. It’s as simple as that.

Can SEO damage my store?

SEO optimization can make things worse if not done well. There are some rules that you have to follow and I will talk about them later in this blog post. Keep in mind that if you are not doing the things below correctly or overdo them, you risk damaging your store’s reputation. All tips that you will find below are search engine friendly and will rank you higher in the search results.

Be patient

Be patient! Don’t expect results after one hour or one day after the changes you make. It takes time for the search engines’ crawlers to visit your store again and read the updated content. That could happen after a week or even a month. It’s different for every website.

Let’s go to the important stuff now.

1. Avoid duplicate content.

Google and the other search engines do not like duplicated pages and you have to get rid of them. It’s a must-do.

Here is a common example of duplicate content: In most cases, your store can be opened from two URLs - and . Search engines think that these are two different sites and treat them as identical. This is bad for you and your store - you have to make sure that your store can be accessed from only one of the addresses. Here is how to do it for OpenCart.

Open the file .htaccess in your root folder and find the following lines:

RewriteEngine On RewriteBase /

After these lines add the following code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.+) [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)

That code will redirect all queries to yourstore.com.

If you want to do it the other way around, replace the lines with the code below:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(?!www.)(.+) [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)

That code will redirect all yourstore.com queries to www.yourstore.com.

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