08 Mar 2008 12:28:06 | Kamran Rizvi
So you've finally realized that the best shopping cart solution,
currently being utilized by your website doesn't answer an
important question. How to attract the masses searching for
related products on Google to your store?
The era for first generation of shopping carts is almost over.
Where the basic purpose for programmers was to design a database
solution for the netpreneur to deploy his e-business plan with
ease. Shopping carts existed to automate most of the tasks for
this netpreneur while providing a fast and friendly
transaction-processing interface to the buyers. However the lack
of advertising funds and conversion ratio analysis of visitors
from search engines have shifted the emphasis from business
automation to 'SEO friendliness' of the shopping cart itself.
"Inquiries for a custom installation of search engine friendly
cart have almost tripled from last year" says Abid Malik, CEO of
ebanyan.com, a shopping
cart solution provider.
Developers have also addressed this need by coming up with
various versions of shopping cart solutions that build search
engine optimized catalog of products. Some with solid features
and some with just marketing hype. This article will help you
differentiate the two.
The unfriendliest feature of a typical shopping cart is its url
structure. Most of the pages are generated on the fly through a
database query. The url's resulting from these queries have two
basic problems. Firstly the very popular '?' mystery. Secondly,
the less talked about loss of heirarchy in shopping cart's
catalog.
The '?' in urls' is not that big mystery now, as it was a couple
of years back. Google was the first to update its technology to
make room for it, other engines have been following and catching
up on this issue. However the second problem we mentioned above
is the real reason why your catalog needs static urls. We need
to guide the spider where we have grouped our similar content.
For example, it should know that there's a folder called
'routers' which mainly has files associated with cisco routers.
Then within this folder, there are different series of routers,
2600, 1700 etc,. Compare the following two URL's:
Style1 www.some-cisco-reseller.net/1700.htm
www.some-cisco-reseller.net/2600.htm
www.some-cisco-reseller.net/3625.htm
Style2 www.some-cisco-reseller.net/cisco/routers/index.asp
www.some-cisco-reseller.net/cisco/routers/1700.asp
www.some-cisco-reseller.net/cisco/routers/2600.asp
Needless to say that the 'Style1' ignores the importance of
grouping the content in specific folders (unless you are only
dealing in one product category) and thereby will not achieve
higher rankings for general category searches like 'cisco
routers'. The more the spider familiarizes itself with your
website, the folders you have for various categories of
products, the chances are that it will increase your ranking for
those product category searches.
This logic is also justified by the theme-based algorithmic
elements of today's search engines. If the grouping of content
is nicely laid out in catalog's urls', you make spider's life
easy thereby gaining more points in the relevancy algorithm.
Apart from the SE friendly URLs', we need to customize a few
html elements for each page. For example the 'title' tag should
be different for each page. Instead of having a 'Welcome To XYZ
Network Corp.', we should have the product name, category name
and the company name in the title tag. Having specific product
ID keywords like MEM-RSM-128M (cisco memory module) in the title
tag will also boost your rankings. There should also be room for
custom meta tags for each product page as well as some bolded
text or headlines should be generated on each product/category
main page using important keywords.
To conclude we can say that 'Not All SEO Friendly Carts Are
Created Equal'. So make sure you check the SEO features in
detail or get an expert's opinion before investing in a new
solution.
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