Proper Page Title Naming for the Home Page and Categories - PHP

If you use osCommerce for your site's e-commerce, and you're not happy with the quality or quantity of visitors your site receives, keep reading. Though osCommerce provides some excellent features, its weaknesses could be getting in the way of giving you the number of visitors and conversions you expect. Fortunately, there's a solution, hidden in something as simple as a title tag.

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By: Codex-M

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May 21, 2009

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General warning:Before doing any on-site work, do not forget to back up your original files.

Now that we know the basic files that need to be edited to give your site the most relevant and unique page titles, we will come up with a good strategy to change those titles into something we want.

The home page Title should be an SEO-optimized title tag.
We can use the category variablecPathin the URL to fetch the correct category name in the MySQL database. As long as the URL is given, we can use PHP to analyze the URL, grab the category ID number, communicate to the MySQL database and finally grab the corresponding category name.
The appropriate product category name should then be returned as the category page title.
The same technique will be applied to the product pages. ThecPathID number corresponds to the product ID with the corresponding product name in the MySQL database.

PHP script for producing unique titles for the home page and category pages (actual script in blue):

<head>

<?php

$optimizedurl=$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];

if (preg_match("/cPath/i", $optimizedurl))

{

//this is a category page, extract the category name

$location1=(strpos($optimizedurl,'cPath'));

$start= $location1 + 6;

$categoryextracted=substr($optimizedurl,$start,2);

$result = mysql_query("SELECT `categories_name` FROM `categories_description` WHERE `categories_id`='$categoryextracted'")

or die(mysql_error());

$row = mysql_fetch_array($result)

or die("Invalid query: " . mysql_error());

echo "<br />";

$titletag = $row['categories_name'];

}

else

//this is the root page

{

$titletag = 'Put your SEO optimized title tag here for the homepage';

}

Let me explain how the PHP script above will get the appropriate page title. It starts with

$optimizedurl=$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];

This script will get the URL of the page and store it to a variable. Note that$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]is not perfectly compatible with Windows Server, and there are things that need to be adjusted; explaining them is beyond the scope of this tutorial. However, you can read it here:

http://www.php.net/reserved.variables

Now, since the index.php will cover both the home page and the category pages, we need to determine whether the URL analyzed by PHP is for a category page or the root URL. This script will provide the answer: