Changing URL address

[fancykidz]

Hi,

I'm pretty sure this issue has been asked before but i tried searching the forum for an answer and no luck ....

How do i change the url address of my website eg:
my contact us page reads:
http://www.fancykidz.com.au/index.ph...age=contact_us

how can i change it to www.fancykidz.com.au/contact-us

[joejoejoe]

Go to the addons page and search for "URL" - there are a couple of add-ons. One is called Simple SEO URL, I think there's one with"friendly" in the title.

[schoolboy]

Actually... you should not really "tamper" with the URL's - even though there are many people who say that the "nice-names" format for URL's help with SEO.

They don't...

The big search engines PREFER that the dynamic URL is maintained, and with zencart (who constructs very "clean" URL's), the SE's have no problem getting all they need to index and rank your website.

We've just had a situation where a so-called "SEO expert" was hired by one of our clients to get a better google rank, and the guy was given access to the c-Panel and site admin. He set about installing and "experimenting" with a variety of these "SEO URL modules" and all he achieved was the near-total destruction of the site!

It took 4 hours to undo the damage.

If you are intent on having URL re-writing, then please go ahead - and if you are in a business that is competitive to my clients, then I would actually urge you to go ahead... There's a good chance that the damage you may do to your site will result in less competition for us!

[fancykidz]

Actually... you should not really "tamper" with the URL's - even though there are many people who say that the "nice-names" format for URL's help with SEO.

They don't...

The big search engines PREFER that the dynamic URL is maintained, and with zencart (who constructs very "clean" URL's), the SE's have no problem getting all they need to index and rank your website.

We've just had a situation where a so-called "SEO expert" was hired by one of our clients to get a better google rank, and the guy was given access to the c-Panel and site admin. He set about installing and "experimenting" with a variety of these "SEO URL modules" and all he achieved was the near-total destruction of the site!

It took 4 hours to undo the damage.

If you are intent on having URL re-writing, then please go ahead - and if you are in a business that is competitive to my clients, then I would actually urge you to go ahead... There's a good chance that the damage you may do to your site will result in less competition for us!

Thanks Schoolboy for the advise. I've had a quick browse through your website and the URL addresses seem to be clean and don't have all the &?_index ect..

[RescoCCC]

Thanks Schoolboy for the advise. I've had a quick browse through your website and the URL addresses seem to be clean and don't have all the &?_index ect..

If you're talking about his furniture site, it isn't built with Zen Cart. His other site is, and it has the standard Zen Cart URL format.

Oh, and I agree with him. Messing with trying to "clean" URLs is a waste of time.

[schoolboy]

Yes... we build sites in Wordpress, Joomla, Zencart, Magento.. and a variety of ASPX formats.

Interestingly, we sometimes use the WordPress "nice-names" feature - largely because BLOG sites are read by PEOPLE, and a verbal URL can be more intuitive.

But we don't ever tamper with Zencart. Even when we list our clients on Google Shopping (Google Merchant Centre), the URL is largely irrelevant, because Google formats the links using the page titles and description tags.

Today (and certainly since Google introduced PANDA), the KEY focus is on quality content, logical and relevant structure within a site, and frequent additions and improvements to content.

We have a client who focuses intently on qualitative elements of his site's content, and for many of his critical keyphrase search terms, he is getting positions 1, 2, and 3 on Google. In total, his site has over 400 products now, and ALL of them feature in Google's TOP THREE positions.

And his site is on a completely NATIVE installation of zencart...