OpenCart Portal – Open Source e-Commerce software Open Cart e-commerce portal. Advice, tutorials, add-ons and everything you need to know about this Open Source shopping cart.
We all know how important are SEO-friendly URLS for search engine optimization and your position in search engine results. SEO-Friendly links not only increase the Google ranking, but will also allow you to more easily identify page for visitors, because category or product name is also displayed in search results as URL. This is a feature that have every online store should have, and as we will see below, enabling it in OpenCart is not complicated.
How do I enable friendly links in OpenCart?
Log into your administration panel and go to the System -> Settings. Select Server, set the SEO Friendly URL’s to “Yes” and save your changes. Your website server must have Apache module mod_rewrite installed. If you don’t know whether it is installed or not, check your hosting settings or ask hosting provider. If your server does not have mod_rewrite, you can switch to our recommended OpenCart hosting, which is dedicated for OpenCart and has everything pre-configured, so you don’t have to deal with this problem.
Then log on to the FTP server. In the root (main) catalog You’ll see .htaccess file, which is used for running Apache directives for http server. It’s filename is “.htaccess.txt”, and to enable it to run change it’s name to “.htaccess”, trimming the “.txt” suffix. Save the file on the server.
Now, to make sure that new SEO-friendly URLs work correctly, edit one of your products, set some SEO keyword in “Data” tab and save your changes. Go to the store homepage, find edited product and choose it. See if the browser displays the name in the format http://yourstore/category/seoname. If yes, it means that you have correctly enabled a friendly links.
In order to use them in whole store, add them now to all products, categories and information pages. Remember that this field shouldn’t contain special characters, space (instead of them use hyphen) or parentheses. Another rule is uniqueness of URLs, so don’t name two products with the same keyword. If you have two or more similar products with the same name, add subsequent numbers to its keywords. That’s everything you need to know about this issue.
