Please get in touch if you require help with setting up or any other aspects of using Opencart.

To Create a Product Category in Opencart 

I have had to supply this information so many time that I thought it might be useful if I published it for anyone setting up an Opencart e-shop. If you need help with your Opencart e-shop plesae just get in tough and I will be happy to quote for any work you require.

1)     Log on to your site’s Admin Panel

2)      From the CATALOG menu on the navigation bar at the top, select CATEGORIES

3)      Click the INSERT button located towards to top right of the screen

4)      Now you are on the Create Category page. You will notice there are now lots of empty boxes into which you’ll input the category details. Start to enter the information required I have included a full description of what each of the empty boxes does

5)      Category Name                – This is the name of the category that is displayed to the front end user. This name should make intuitive sense to a human but also if possible this should contain words that we think our site visitors will be searching for because Opencart also uses the information inputted for category and product names, and inserts it as the Meta Page Title. This means that from an SEO perspective, it’s imperative that we try to work your primary keywords into the product & category labels

To illustrate this point, imagine that we owed a nursery selling plants of various descriptions. We might set-up a category for Ferns & Shrubs. We could label this category by using the Latin names for ferns & shrubs as Latin names are commonly used by gardeners, but we’d expect a greater percentage of our potential customers online to be searching using the English words and so it would be a mistake not to use the English terms to label our category.

6)      Meta Tag Description – The meta tag description has a dual purpose and it’s important to understand what function this tag performs before we can choose what to put into this field. The Meta description of a web page isn’t visible when a user directly views the page itself, instead it’s used by search engines to help them index the page content.

However, the meta description is visible when a user makes a search in a search engine. It’s the two or three lines of text that appear directly beneath the title of a page in the search results page. So while they are a number of technical factors to consider when writing a good meta description, one must remain mindful that this text should also make sense to a person and that what you enter in this field can be used to encourage a user to visit your site rather than the nine or more other sites listed on the search engine’s results page.

As the search engine itself will use this text in no small way to rank your page and help them to index it it’s really important that make sure we use some of our primary key phrases, and the earlier they appear in the text the better. it’s also important to remember that the tag is also scored for relevancy to the page content, and that mean that the keywords and phrases that we use here should also appear in the main body of the page itself and again the earlier the better.

Ideally meta descriptions should not exceed 200 characters but should not be less than 80 either. Correct grammar is essential so do not capitalise words of insert multiple exclamation marks (example: …FREE!!!! or LOOK!!!…)  as this is viewed as being “spammy” and it is likely that you tag will be marked down as a result.

7)      Meta Tag Keywords – For the lay-person, keywords would be better thought of as key-phrases. When we search, we seldom do so using just a single word as it’s likely that the returned results will contain too broad a range of web pages with completely irrelevant listings, so we tend to search for 2, 3 or more words at a time.

As with the meta tag description above the keywords will also be checked for relevancy to the page content and this means that ideally all the key phrases you list here should also appear somewhere in the main body of the page. The earlier they appear in the page the more weight they carry with the search engine

What comes as a surprise to many people is that keywords are not the be-all and end-all of SEO. In fact the algorithms used by search engines are becoming so complex that there are some web developers  that claim the keywords tag has become virtually obsolete.  I do not share this opinion, and include the keywords tag in all of my work but it is true to say that the collective impact of other factors must not be overlooked and that an over reliance on the keywords tag can erroneous approach to SEO

There is no agreed upon standard format to work from when listing keywords and so I’ll simple show you how I do it, and what has produce good results with my own work.

I recommend keywords are inputted like this: [keyword/phrase][SPACE][COMMA] [keyword/phrase][SPACE][COMMA] [keyword/phrase][SPACE][COMMA]

Buy cheap shrubs, Shop for shrubs, Gardening supplies shrubs, Hardy low maintenance plants,

IMPORTANT: Use no more than 20 keywords/key-phrases and be sure not to use the same single word more than 3 times through-out the whole tag.

By gaining an understanding  following these rules-of-thumb you should have an SEO friendly keywords tag that will perform well in the vast majority of instances

8)      Description – Information entered here will appear directly on the category page and there are a number of important factors to remember when creating your category description.

The description text will have a big impact how a search engine ranks your page but when a person views your category page the description text will perform a completely different job and that is to act as an overview to help users quickly locate products in your shop. We’ll start with the SEO side to start with.

Remember that we considered the tag-relevancy score when entering the Meta Tag Description and Meta Tag Keywords. It’s important to include as many of the references we used in the metas, here in the main body of the page. The earlier in the page that a keyword appears the greater the weight that will be attached to that term.

I recommend that a category description is not less than 200 words or so but the upper limit is dictated by the amount of information we expect a shopper to read. The trick here, is to strike a balance between effective SEO which will ensure that our site has plenty of traffic and the needs of the end user to quickly navigate you shop, find what they’re looking for and encourage them to make a purchase.

9)      Next click on the DATA tab which is located towards the top of the page

10)   Parent Category – By selecting a parent category from the drop down list you can set the Category you are currently working on to show as a sub-category of any previously created category. Simply select the parent category from the list available, if left blank then your new category will be treated as a parent or “Top Level” category. By structuring our categories in an intuitive and easily understood way we can help visitors of your site to quickly locate the products that they are looking for.

11)   Stores – This option only applies for those people who are running multiple stores from the one admin panel if you are only running the one store simply make sure that DEFAULT check box is ticked.

12)   SEO Keyword – Input the primary keyword or most relevant key-phrase to the content of the category.  It should be inputted in a special format. Again using our garden center example we might decide to enter the category title Ferns & Shrubs, but it should be inputted in a format which matches below;

“ferns-and-shrubs”

13)   Image – Each category can also have a category image, This is another opportunity to buy a point or two in terms of the SEO for your category page by using and image that has been named using a primary keyword example of this might be: ferns-and-shurbs.jpg

14)   Top – Check this box if you want the category to appear in the main navigation bar of your shop.

15)   Columns – When a top level category has many child categories we can opt to display the child categories in columns which can be easier for the user to view than if they were simply stacked on top of one another. Select the number of columns that will be displayed by entering in a number value either 1, 2 or 3

16)   Sort Order – This section allows you to choose the order that a category appears in the list.  Simply enter a number into this field that corresponds to the order that you want you final category list to appear.

17)   Status – Opencart gives you the option to turn product categories on or off by enabling or disabling them.  And enabled product or category can be viewed by visitors to your shop and vice versa.

18)   Now click the DESIGN tab you will see just the single option here, to override the default layout of the category page.  You can tell Opencart to treat the page in the same way as other parts of your shop.  Some times for ascetic reasons an Opencart shop may be set up with varying colum widths and different banners for different sections of the shop.  In most cases there will be no reason to set an override and if you’re unsure then just leave it as it is.

Of course all the data entered while creating a product category can be altered or edited at a later time but by taking the trouble to complete your category pages carefully you can be sure that your category structure will be set up for maximum SEO performance.