Thread: XCSEO Pro
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Old 05-15-2008, 11:15 AM
 
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Join Date: Dec 2005
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Default Re: XCSEO Pro - Best X-Cart SEO module available!

Below is a testimonial, written for XC SEO [basic]. I felt it is relevant, as XCSEO Pro is based on some of XC SEO [basic]'s code and principles, and it also references the quality of results you can expect from PHP Site Solutions

Quote:
Originally Posted by Case Study: JoBananas.com

Having been running our online business since 2000 on a leading UK based HTML shopping cart solution, towards the end of last year we decided that some of our required features were unable to be developed by our current vendor. With this in mind we began the process of evaluating a suitable replacement that gave us a greater degree of flexibility in design and expansion.. Having a few years X-Cart experience under our belts on smaller scale stores we decided that X-Cart met almost all of our needs and took the plunge to make the conversion.

Once our design was complete and the products had been loaded (all done in house) our next challenge was to decide on a suitable SEO option as by default the X-Cart PHP URL or HTML catalog was never going to be an ideal solution. After reading forums and customer reviews our initial decision was to plum for the CD-SEO module and in November our site was live and running on this mod. We always had a couple of reservations about CD-SEO.

a) CDSEO always seemed slow to output pages. ( I guess due to a lot of the code being obsfucated, code design, etc)
b) We were always concerned about burying our URLs in a sub category as this is how CD-SEO works and is sold as an advantage for the user to add "additional keywords" into the page URL. All the SEO talk we have ever read tells you to get your product URL coming off the sites root directory. One of the most common questions asked on the support forum is how do I move my cart to root level!

After a few months our internal pages were beginning to slump in the SERPS even after being properly managed by .htaccess and 301 redirects and top 3 positions for our main products that we had held for many years had now gone. Customers had also started to complain about the speed of our site compared to competitors also running on X-Cart. We eliminated the server possibility as we are running on a fast dedicated Linux box with lots of memory and disk arrays, we monitored the performance over a period of time and at different times during the day.

Whilst browsing the forums one day we checked out a couple of X-Cart sites running the XC-SEO mod and noticed a significant speed difference with sites that had a similar product number and style to our own store. We contacted Jonathan at PHP Site Solutions and asked him his opinion about our issues and if we would see both a speed and search result benefit from converting to XC-SEO. Jonathan could not have been more helpful and went beyond the call on helping us setup what is still in fact a FREE mod. He handled the removal of CD-SEO from our store and took care of both the URL redirections and our XML sitemap generation that was initially causing us a few headaches.

It was instantaneous to see the improved speed benefits XC-SEO brought to our store and within hours customers were beginning to ask us how we managed to speed up the site. Within a couple of weeks our SERPS had also started to improve and looks on track to be back where we were before the change of cart platform.

We cannot recommend the services of PHP Site Solutions and Jonathan enough, XC-SEO should be on every X-Cart store owners lists of "Must Have Mods" and is an essential part of any good search engine strategy.

David Smith
Co Owner
JoBananas Body Jewellery
www.JoBananas.com
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