X-Cart Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

There are several major SEO modules available, which provide search engine friendly (SEF) urls for the X-Cart eCommerce system.
Each of the following SEO modules get rid of the nasty default X-Cart URLs, such as:

product.php?productid=3&cat=5&page=2
home.php?cat=3
manufacturers.php?manufacturerid=5
pages.php?pageid=8

And replaces them with readable URLs that contain keywords relevant to the page being viewed.

XCSEO Basic

Author: Jon Langevin of PHP Site Solutions
Price: Free
Install Price: $30
License: GNU/GPL (open source)
Description:
XCSEO Basic is a free, open-source SEO module available for X-Cart.
This module has been available for roughly 3 years to members of the X-Cart community, and was the first SEO module to make use of X-Cart’s Smarty templating engine to automatically replace all URLs found within an X-Cart website. Until the introduction of XCSEO Basic, other modules such as DSEFU and CDSEO had a nasty installation routine, involving manual replacing of any place a URL was generated by X-Cart.

Pros:

• Replaces .php URLs with search engine friendly URLs
• Fastest solution available for X-Cart search engine optimization
• 301 Redirects old URLs to the new destination
• Corrects mis-typed or malformed URLs to the correct URL destination
• Adds anchor hover-text (the text you see when you hover a URL) to all URLs that are replaced within your X-Cart store
• Great support from PHP Site Solutions

Cons:

• Is limited by embedded page ids, such as -c-3-pr-1234

DSEFU Pro

Author: John Heath of SafetyNetWeb
Price: $49.95
Install Price: $25
License: Commercial (closed source)
Description:
DSEFU Pro is one of the first SEO modules available for X-Cart, and it’s author is greatly respected by the X-Cart community.

Pros:

• Replaces .php URLs with search engine friendly URLs
• 301 Redirects old URLs to the new destination
• Corrects mis-typed or malformed URLs to the correct URL destination
• Great support from SafetyNetWeb

Cons:

• Is limited by embedded page ids, such as -c-3-pr-1234
• Uses call home licensing (which also affects site load speed)

XCSEO Pro

Author: Jon Langevin of PHP Site Solutions
Price: $120 (not including discounts applied for migrating from CDSEO or DSEFU products)
Install Price: $30
License: Commercial (closed source)
Description:
XCSEO Pro is the commercial alternative to XCSEO Basic, giving you full control over your URLs.
As XCSEO Basic has a first (first module to support the Smarty outputfilter technique), XCSEO Pro also has a first, as the first module to support manual specification of arbitrary urls, a feature which has not yet been duplicated by any other X-Cart SEO module.

Pros:

• Complete URL control, no embedded ids in the url
• Supports custom page titles, custom meta keywords, custom meta description, and custom anchor hover-text
• Only module to support arbitrary urls, meaning if a URL in X-Cart isn’t supported by the module for rewriting, you can manually specify to have that url rewritten by XCSEO Pro
• 301 Redirects old URLs to the new destination
• XCSEO Pro is continually updated as needed for compatibility, bug fixes, new features, and these updates are always provided freely to XCSEO Pro customers
• Top notch support by PHP Site Solutions, any issues reported by customers have been handled same day, within hours if not minutes

Cons:

• Was initially released with some features pending, but those features have since been added in an update made available to all customers

CDSEO Pro

Author: Jon Peters of WebsiteCM
Price: $199.99
Install Price: $50
License: Commercial (primarily closed source)
Description:
CDSEO Pro is the successor to the previous module, CDSEO. CDSEO (the old version) was greatly hindered in performance due to extreme code obfuscation techniques and excessive database querying. It was also limited by a subfolder requirement for each area supported (Products & Categories, and then as separate modules at additional cost, Manufacturers & Static Pages). CDSEO Pro has none of these issues, is presented with a new administration interface, and some minor added features.

Pros:

• 301 Redirects old URLs to the new destination
• Adds anchor hover-text (the text you see when you hover a URL) to all URLs that are replaced within your X-Cart store
• Provides custom control of page titles, meta keywords, meta description, anchor hover-text
• Supports CSV import/export of URLs

Cons:

• Much higher price over the competition for similar features
• No support for arbitrary urls
• Poor support has driven a number of customers to the competitors’ products