osCommerce Watch

A huge number of osCommerce-based sites do not pay attention to one of the most important determinants in achieving meaningful search engine rankings and listings.

The HTML title tag is what appears in the top bar of your web browser. It is often very important in terms of how search engines rank pages. Your page is more likely to rank high for a search when your title tag includes the words searched for. The page title is also what search engines display most prominently when they list your site along with the other results returned after a search. If this says something irrelevant to your site content, you are greatly reducing the chance that someone will click through to your site.

By default on the base system this says "osCommerce". This should, at minimum, be changed to reflect the name of your store and keywords related to the products you sell. This can be redefined in the catalog/includes/languages/english.php file (or the primary language file for the other languages you are using). Look for where the "TITLE" is defined.

Going beyond this, there are some reasonably minor modifications which you can make to provide more meaningful page titles. I will outline these in a later post.