FAQ: What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Friendly Shopping Cart Checklist

Does your web site have a shopping cart? If so, did you consider search engine optimization when picking your shopping cart program? Chances are pretty good that your site is missing out on a sizable amount of targeted search engine traffic if SEO has been overlooked.

In this article, we'll break down some of the things he should look for in a search engine from the shopping cart program.

First, what is shopping cart software?

When building an online store, most companies will need to build a homepage that leads to product category pages and product pages. The only exception to this is businesses that offer a very limited number of products.

Assuming you have enough products to break things down into category and product pages, you’ll probably run into a maintenance nightmare if you attempt to build an individual page for every product and category. The solution to this is to store your product information in a database, then serve up that information dynamically to the web. This can be done with a lot of different programming languages, but basically involves creating a template where a product’s name, price, description, reviews, etc., are integrated into the page when someone clicks to that page. When a visitor clicks to a product page, the page fetches the requested product information to the visitor. This is a great way to maintain a shopping cart site because it separates a store’s content from the design. With this format, you can easily make changes to a site’s design or content. To change the design, just change a few product and category templates. To change the content (pricing, descriptions, etc.) use an online interface to change the content in the database.

What should look for in a shopping cart program?

1. Does the cart use frames?

Web sites build in frames are very difficult for search engines to read appropriately, and shopping carts build frames are no exception. A good shopping cart solution will serve all the content is one page including the navigation, headers, and body of the page. Here is an example of what a search engine will see on a site build frames:

This is what you see:

And this is what search engines see:

Clearly, there isn't much information they are the search engine to decide what the web pages about. Additionally, the surgeon general only see this one page rather than seen every page of your web site. This will cost you a lot of search engine traffic because many of your prospective customers will likely be searching by specific products or product categories that you inventory. If it's invisible to the search engines, it's invisible to your prospective customers

2. Does it serve up unique title tags for each page?

If every web page on your site is unique, shouldn't each web page have unique title that describes was on the page? Shopping cart programmers often overlook this, and that’s a costly mistake. The copy used in the title take carries a lot of weight with search engines, so using a title that describes was on the web page will help your site rank higher for relevant search phrases. Commonly, shopping carts will simply serve up the company name as the title take on every page of the web site.

Since your shopping cart database contains a lot of descriptive information about your products, why not serve up unique title that describes the product that's on the page? This is a fairly easy problem to correct, so make sure you do it if you shopping or doesn't already at this place.

Title (White on Blue text at top of browser, “Natural Journeys Online Store”) does not correlate with page content (videos of back care exercises).

3. Does it create a breadcrumb trail?

When someone clicks into a product category within your web site, and then maybe one step further into a subcategory, followed by clicking into a specific product page, are they provided within easy way to get back to where they came from? If they want to find out more information about related products, is their link they can click on to do that? Your shopping for program should know how your products are related, such as what category a product falls within, so it should be able to dynamically create a breadcrumb trail. This helps your users navigate your web site, but it also puts more relevant copy onto your web pages so it'll also help your individual product pages rank higher.

4. Does it assign session IDs?

If your shopping pair program requires cookies for other types of session variables, search engines may not be able to follow your web site at all. It goes without saying that you're not going to receive much business from a web site it's invisible to search engines.

How is this for a welcome message for search engine spiders:

How does Haystack In A Needle address this with clients?

With current clients, we audit their sites to break down what they’ll need to do to make their current sites more search engine friendly. In some cases, the only solution is to scrap their current site, then build a new site for them on a better shopping cart platform. For an example of what effect this can have on sales, in the fall of 2003, we transferred a client’s site off a non-search engine friendly cart and saw revenue generated over the next 3 months equal the previous 12 months.

In other cases, we’re able to work with the cart designers to make some of the adjustments outlined above for a reasonable price.

If you’d like to have someone review your online store to make sure it’s search engine friendly, contact us today to have one of our search engine specialists take a look.

Ed Kohler is the president and founder of Haystack In A Needle - a full service web marketing and search engine positioning firm based in Minneapolis, MN.

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