Over the next few days we will be posting a series of blogs to help ecommerce website owners with their SEO strategies:

Planning your Ecommerce SEO strategy

Effective SEO strategy planning is vital prior to designing an ecommerce website. Unfortunately, many companies overlook the SEO element while designing an ecommerce website. They start thinking about SEO feasibility only after developing a beautiful website. As a result, they can end up with needing a significant site redesign to fulfil the SEO requirements.

Always design your website after planning your ecommerce SEO strategy. This will save you valuable time and money, and help your website reach and maintain those coveted top Google positions. Don’t forget though competition is fierce, and you still need to keep a visually appealing site with first rate functionality to secure those sales conversions! Here are some factors to bear in mind:

Ecommerce SEO tips part 1 – Choose your Ecommerce and shopping cart software wisely

Today, the vast majority of e-commerce websites are designed with open source or low-priced shopping cart programs. Such software can adversely affect a website’s search engine-friendliness if you are not familiar with the functionality you need to make SEO work. Even popular shopping cart software, such as Miva Merchant* and OS Commerce, require third party add-ons to implement SEO-compatible features. Low cost ecommerce solutions, although profitable in the short run, can have an adverse effect on your business in the long run.

While developing an ecommerce website, companies should remember that customers depend on search engines to find products to buy. Hence, to attract increased volumes of SEO traffic, companies need to use search-engine friendly ecommerce software. While choosing software, ensure that it is designed to boost the display of your product pages in the search engine results pages (SERP) when a visitor types in a relevant search query.

Several ecommerce software systems use session IDs (without cookies) in website URLs. This can cause search engines to crawl through an unlimited amount of duplicate content which of course causes them a problem and means your site can’t be indexed properly. To prevent this, use an alternative method that helps connect URLs to Google’s spider, without the requirement for session IDs.

Avoid using long query strings in the URLs of your product pages. The URLs should only include the necessary keywords and should not be populated with unwanted IDs or other characters. If you are not willing to use software to rewrite all URLs, consider minimising the number of variables used in the URL.

UPDATE:
Thanks to Andy from West Florida Components (see comment below) for pointing out the mistake in the article. I’m afraid a draft version of the post was published by mistake before it had been checked fully. We do apologise to all for the error.

*MIVA Merchant 5.0 DOES have built-in SEO features including search engine friendly URL’s.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, June 28th, 2009 at 9:33 pm and is filed under Ecommerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.