Introduction > X-Cart Key Features > 

Search Engine Optimization

To promote your store, you will probably want to have it listed with popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. In designing X-Cart, we did our best to optimize it for search engines. The structure and content of X-Cart pages are designed in accordance with the major search engine requirements. This should help you get more traffic an more targeted customers from search engines. X-Cart's HTML catalog feature can help you make your store even more search engine friendly.

X-Cart allows you to control META tags that are included into every page of your store's front-end. In addition to defining META description and META keywords for the website in general, you can choose to define META description and META keywords for each category in your store and include them into your website's META tags. Using tags relevant to the page content can significantly improve the page's rating with search engines.

Note:        META tags for separate products are generated automatically using product name and description and cannot be defined.

The profile of each registered customer stores information about the customer's referer - URL from which the customer came to the store before he or she registered a customer account.

Today, static HTML pages tend to gain better rankings with modern search engines than pages generated dynamically. X-Cart provides dynamic interactive experience to its users by generating web pages whose content can change in response to different contexts and conditions. In this sense, the web pages generated by X-Cart are dynamic. From the viewpoint of search engine friendliness, that is a disadvantage. To overcome this disadvantage, X-Cart provides a feature that can improve the standing of your product catalog pages with search engines - HTML catalog. HTML catalog is a static version of the storefront. It exists simultaneously with the dynamic version. Shoppers are referred to the static HTML catalog of your store through search engines. They remain in the static part as long as they browse through the products and categories, but as soon as they attempt to add a product to the shopping cart, to do a search or to perform any other operation that involves usage of the database, they are redirected to the dynamic part of the store.

It is possible to generate a separate HTML catalog for every language supported by your store.

X-Cart provides a group of options for search engine optimization of your store website. Using these options, it is possible to define a general META description and keywords for your store website, to define META descriptions and keywords for your products and categories and to include them into your website's META tags, to define the page title format and length, etc.