Does Ultimate SEO URL's Add-On Actually work?

[kaginken]

I see a lot of info about SEO URL but cannot find anything that says if it actually helps increase my search engine rankings.

One thing I can say is, since moving my site to Zen-Cart, my rankings have gone way down. Off the map even. And I know why - I need my page URL's and image names, and anything else I can rename to have site keywords.

Will Ultimate SEO URL do this, or even some of this, reliably? Does anyone have experience with this, is it well supported, stable,etc?

Any feedback would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance...

Byte Knight Solutions

[rstevenson]

For the search phrase "fine art greeting cards" (which exactly describes our products) our two sites rank #1 and #5 on page 1 at Google. We have given no attention at all to SEO tricks and games and have installed no SEO add-ons. On the web there are three things that work to give you high ranking:
1. lots of relevant text on your pages
2. lots of high-quality incoming links
3. time

It's number 3 that causes most people the most trouble. We've been on the web for more than a decade (4 1/2 years with Zen Cart) and you can't fake that with any SEO mod.

Rob

[rstevenson]

I should also say that there are lots of other threads here in the forum discussing SEO in general and specific mods in particular, and you'll see lots of opinions expressed there too. But the general consensus is that SEO URLs are not necessary with Zen Cart because Google understands well-formed dynamic URLs such as are provided by Zen Cart. SEO in general is, however, a process through which you can improve your site overall.

Rob

[gjh42]

since moving my site to Zen-Cart, my rankings have gone way down.

How long has it been since you moved? What kind of link redirection did you do from your old site URLs to Zen Cart URLs? What kind of content do you have on your site?

[kaginken]

My previous site with some good search engine rankings had static HTML pages with names like "htcp_media_computer.html". Now, all my pages are like <domain>/id=2;product=3

I moved to my new zen-cart site about a month ago - I didn't use any link redirection, so there's still some of my old links floating around out there. For those old links, I am leveraging zen-cart's 'page_not_found" page, which displays my site map and gives the person at least a valid page with links to the rest of my live site. Not ideal, but for a new site like mine, good enough, and I would expect those old links to go away soon.

FWIW, my site is byteknightsolution.com I sell custom built home theater PC's (HTPC).

One thing I plan on doing is trying the SEO URL addon, as well as adding my keywords into all my headers, page titles and anywhere else a search engine may pay extra attention to them, like in my headers, etc. That's all I did with my old site, and it was quickly coming up high in the rankings.

Thank you both for the input. I still wish someone with experience using it could weigh in on if it did or didn't help them.

[dbltoe]

Have you gone to the support thread for the add-on? You will find literally 100s of horror stories there.

Leave Zen Cart alone as it will handle the search engines just fine.

Get a redirect yesterday!

Reread posts two and three.

If you decide to ignore them and go with the add-on, how's about 10 to 1 odds that you'll have problems? I could use some vacation money

[schoolboy]

There is absolutely no need to mess about with core ZC behaviour, in the belief (hope, more likely) that you will suddenly and magically get to number 1 on Google for all your products overnight.

These "SEO" modules are grossly misnamed... They make not the slightest bit of difference to growing your SE rankings... If anything, they can actually put your site at RISK OF POOR RANKINGS !

Don't touch any of them, there is no need to.

Leave Zen Cart alone as it will handle the search engines just fine.