Meta tags alone will not give you a high search engine ranking but a coordinated effort to integrate your Meta tags to the content of the page and to your products can improve significantly your search engine ranking for relevant keywords or key phrases.

Meta Tags (also known as Header tags) store extra information about your web pages that can not be viewed in the normal way. This behind-the-scenes data is used by most search engines to gather extra information about your web pages. You can view the Meta tag information of a specific page by viewing the source code of the page. If using windows explorer go to View->Source. A separate text window will appear containing the html source code of the web page. If present, a Meta tag may appear as follows:

e.g: META NAME="Description" Content="A cosy practical little fleece hat with doubled fleece band around the ears to keep them really warm. Fabric: Malden Polartec 200! : "

Meta tags can only support the normal textural content of your pages. For each product page you need to change the Meta tags to reflect the keywords in your product description. In osCommerce this can be done using the Meta Tags Contribution (see our demo). This software add-on gives extra functionality to the admin area so that when you add / edit a product you can also add a Meta description, Meta keywords and a page title.

Do you have an osCommerce web site at the moment? You may already have this capability. Here’s how to check:

• Go to any one of your products and take a look at the browser title. That is the title in the top left corner of your browser window. The title is classed as one of the Meta / Header tags and some search engines take the title, together with other factors, to demonstrate what the page is really about.
• In standard osCommerce the title will remain constant throughout (perhaps containing your shop name). If you have the Meta Tags contribution installed, the title and all your other Meta tag details will change for each product enabling you to optimise each page.

The text of the URL or web address is an extra source of important information for the search engine spider. Having your main keywords in the URL for each product and category page can significantly help your search engine rankings. Search Engine Friendly URLs use a server feature called mod_rewrite to rewrite the URL so that the outside world sees only the URL generated by the database from the product name and category name information.

From this: http://www.babyben.co.uk/product_info.php?products_id=1026

To this: http://www.babyben.co.uk/bushaby-waterproof-baby-suit-p-1026.html

In more detail:

osCommerce is a database driven website. This allows fantastic flexibility and means that you can display an unlimited number of products and categories in your osCommerce shop. In common with all database driven sites, osCommerce uses a query string to allow individual php pages to display the information from the database. For example the single product_info.php page (or product page) is used to display every product.

For product 1 the query string will be: http://www.babyben.co.uk/product_info.php?products_id=1
For product 1026 the query string will be: http://www.babyben.co.uk/product_info.php?products_id=1026

Traditionally, search engines have not liked query strings, although most do now interpret them successfully. However, the main drawback is that products_id=1026 contains no product information for the outside world which means this is an extra source of information for a search engine that is not currently being using. The answer is to allow the server to dynamically rewrite the URL via a server function called mod_rewrite. As a result, the http://www.babyben.co.uk/product_info.php?products_id=1026 URL can be shown to the outside world as http://www.babyben.co.uk/bushaby-waterproof-baby-suit-p-1026.html by creating a virtual URL from the product name and category information stored for each product and category. As a result this form of optimisation requires no effort from the store owner. You simply let the server do the work from the product information that you provide.

osCommerce, together with many other e-commerce packages, uses Session IDs to store and track information about customers. The session ID is the long collection of random characters located at the end of the shop URL

e.g. http://www.babyben.co.uk/product_info.php?products_id=38&osCsid=f395b7245da0404c213db6346130b7ca

The main use of session IDs is to recall the previous activity of a customer on your site. For example, a shopping cart which remembers what was added previously by the customer. However, session ids can cause problems for some search engines. osCommerce gets round this problem by using logic, to check if the visitor to your store is a search engine spider or a potential customer (spider is the name given to the search engine robot which visits your site because it crawls all over your pages and through your links). If a spider is recognised, session IDs are not given to the spider thus enabling your pages to be indexed correctly.

Spiders are recognised by comparing the spider's name to a long list of known search engine spiders. As you can imagine, new search engines are being created all the time, so it is important to keep your site’s list of spiders upto date.