SEO Friendly Shopping Cart

I don’t have a specific recommendation for you. What I do have is a list of features you should look for if you’re planning on building an ecommerce site that will depend on search engine optimization to attract customers and drive revenue.

Lest we cause any confusion, I am using the term “shopping cart” to refer to any of the software that is used for cataloging, organizing, or otherwise displaying products on an ecommerce site, in addition to the pages involved in the checkout process.

1. URL structure. The structure of your URLs is critical. The URL should appear to search engines to be a static page, or in other words, the search engine shouldn’t be able to tell that the page is pulling information from a database as opposed to just having been built completely from scratch in raw HTML. Ideally you’ll want the ability to specify the exact text of the URL so that you can include your keywords in it in the way that will produce the best results.

Bad URL – www.yourcompany.com/products/product.php?lkghl5323FDgdfd

Slightly Better URL – www.yourcompany.com/products/product000224123.html

Best URL – www.yourcompany.com/computers/software/anti-virus/mcafee-antivirus80.html

The first URL tells us nothing by itself, and guess what? That means the search engine can’t tell anything from the URL either. The second URL is slightly better in that it at least looks like a static page, but the difference between these two URLs is very slight compared to the third URL.

Without knowing anything else about this website, what can we tell just from the URL? We can tell that this website sells computer stuff, including anti-virus software, and we also know they specifically sell McAfee’s anti virus software and we can tell what version they sell. This means that if someone searches on Google for “computers”, “software”, “anti virus software”, or “mcafee anti virus software” this page has a chance of coming up in the rankings even if nothing else were done to make the page or site SEO friendly. All things being equal, a shopping cart with this kind of URL structure is going to rank higher than one that doesn’t.

2. Title tag control. If you’re not clear on what title tags are read our post on title tag basics. Title tags are a huge part of what search engines use to rank a website, and having control over them is imperative. Make sure your shopping cart software allows you to type in exactly what text you want to be contained in the title tag of each and every page.

You’ll also want to make sure the title tag is not connected to any other information, such as the page name. Sometimes software will allow you to type in text for a title tag but that text also shows up visibly on the page or in the navigation. You don’t want that. You want complete control over the title tag without it affecting anything else whatsoever.

3. Meta tags. Meta tags won’t have a huge effect on SEO, per se, but they can have a large effect on getting people to click on your link in search engine results, since the text contained in the meta description tag shows up in search engines. You’ll want complete control over the meta description tag so that you can create text that will interest search engine users and cause them to click through.

4. Clean HtML. This should be a given, but you need a shopping cart that produces clean HTML that is mostly tableless and uses up to date HTML/CSS.

Anyone got anything to add?