Creating a search engine friendly ecommerce store

Build an ecommerce Web site optimized for search engines with ProductCart

ProductCart includes a number of tools that can help you create an ecommerce Web site that is search engine friendly. Let's look at a few topics and issues that are often raised when it comes to search engines, dynamic pages, and improving traffic to your online store.

Myths and reality

Some people claim that search engines cannot find and index dynamic pages. This is a myth. For example, Google specifically states that the opposite is true. The reality is that in order not to crash your Web server, the various search engines limit the number of dynamic pages that they crawl (e.g. they won't run a search on your store and crawl all the search results). What you can do is help them find and index (or "spider") your dynamic pages.

Plus, you can also have your store use static *.htm pages for your product and category pages. Read below for more information.

Help the "spider"

There are a number of things that you can do to help a search engine find and index your store pages. And our shopping cart software includes a number of tools that will make the job easier.

• Unique meta tags. Having unique meta tags on your dynamic pages is important. For example, many search engine optimization specialists agree that the "Title" meta tag (the name of the page that appears at the top of the browser when you visit that page) is probably the most important piece of information given to the search engine about a Web page. ProductCart includes a dynamic meta tag generator that will automatically create unique tags for all of your category and product pages. Learn more about this tool by downloading our Guide to Building a Search Engine Friendly eCommerce Store with ProductCart or view this feature at work on one of our demo stores.
• Static store map. A good way to help a search engine locate and index a dynamic page is to link to it from a static page. ProductCart can help you create a "site map" of your store listing categories (with or without category descriptions) and their products (with or without product descriptions). Learn more about this tool by downloading our Guide to Building a Search Engine Friendly eCommerce Store with ProductCart.
• Google Sitemaps integration. ProductCart allows you to easily create a properly formatted file to be submitted to Google's new Sitemaps service. This new service will allow you to proactively inform Google of what pages are available on your Web site, so that they can be visited and indexed. Learn more about ProductCart and Google Sitemaps >>
• Static pages. There is an easy way to turn your ASP pages into static *.htm pages on a ProductCart-powered store. This can definitely help improve your rankings. Product and category pages will appear as static Web pages, without any querystrings (e.g. page.asp?idproduct=123). Read this posting in our forum for more details on using standard *.htm pages for your ecommerce store.
• Full control on the store design. ProductCart does not limit you to using any "templates" of any kind. You have total control on the design of your ecommerce Web site. The shopping cart merges seamlessly with whatever layout you come up with. Which means that you can create a search engine friendly interface for your pages, and easily edit it at any time to optimize it.
• Full access to source code. ProductCart is an asp shopping cart, which means that you have full access to its source code, and are free to make changes to it to make the system better suit your needs. For example, you could work with a search engine optimization expert that may have some recommendations that involve changes to the actual structure of your dynamic pages. With ProductCart, you can hire an ASP programmer to make such changes.

How well will your store pages rank?

Is anyone telling you that they will have your ecommerce Web site rank in the top 10 or 20 results? Be wary of any company that offers guaranteed top rankings in any of the major search engines. There is no way to guarantee a certain position (except for the sponsored section of the results, as you probably know).

The truth is that good rankings are the result of dozens of different factors. Having search engine friendly pages is one of them, and ProductCart can help you create dynamic pages that will be crawled and indexed by search engines. Submitting your dynamic pages to services such as Google Sitemaps should also help ensure that your product catalog is indexed.

Ultimately, though, your search engine rankings will be affected by numerous other variables, including the number and quality of external links to your Web store, the copy you have written for your pages, the competitiveness of the keyword phrases that you are targeting, and more.

For more details, read our Guide to Building a Search Engine Friendly eCommerce Store with ProductCart.