Search Engine Friendly Shopping Cart

What if your online store failed because it missed out on thousands of free search engine visitors? If you have an online shopping cart that isn’t built with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind, then you’re probably missing out on a lot of residual traffic that converts at a better-than-average rate.

Are you looking for an ecommerce shopping cart that is search engine friendly? If you’re planning to build an ecommerce store, or aren’t getting results with your current shopping cart, you should consider upgrading to a version that can be read and indexed by search engines. If you want your products to be found in Bing, Yahoo, and Google, having an SEO friendly shopping cart can be a tremendous advantage, because your site can offer a unique web page for every product that you sell.

What makes a shopping cart search engine friendly? Here are some factors that are better if they come “off the shelf” rather than as a result of expensive program modifications:

• Unique titles and descriptions. This could either be accomplished by dynamically adding your product description and part number to the title and description, or by having the ability to write it yourself. For very big shopping carts, a set of dynamic titles in the format of “{item name} Free Shipping on {product number}{item name} at Mystore.com” is a brief example.
• Total control of titles and descriptions. If you can’t put unique titles and descriptions on all your products, you are going to have problems, but some products need hand-crafted title and description fields for better optimization. The ability to write your own titles on any page is also critical if you find that a shopping cart page is cannibalizing the keyword value of a more important page on your site.
• Ability to add content. You may not want to add content on every product page, but if you follow the 80/20 rule, then you know that a certain set of products is responsible for the bulk of your revenue. If you can improve the on-page content on high margin/volume items, you may improve your search engine positions.
• Descriptive URL rendering – Also known as “search engine friendly rewrites” this means that your URL will have a clean look in the style of: example.com/gadgets/widgets/three-handled-gradunza.html. Search engines like to associate words, and you should only include item numbers if people actually search for them. For example, printer ink refills would be a good item to have described numerically in association with the brand name.
• Breadcrumbs – Automatic breadcrumb generation helps search engines categorize your products. Using the example above, a breadcrumb structure may look like: Gadgets>Widgets>Gradunzas.
• Ability to name photos and generate alt tags. Some carts assign numerical values to images. This reduces relevance, and also confuses image search programs that may use your image in their results if it has a descriptive name.
• XML Sitemap Generation – Your shopping cart should be able to generate a new XML Sitemap (AKA a Google Sitemap) whenever products are added or removed. Search engines use these sitemaps to find pages they haven’t heard about, so you may want your cart to redirect old pages that have been removed to a similar category.
• Minimal Parameters – If your URL contains a lot of ampersands and question marks, it becomes harder for the search engine to read. There should be a setting in the cart for “search engine friendly rewrites” that takes care of this for you.
• Part of your own site - A shopping cart that resolves to your main domain (not a subdomain!) can leverage the trust and PageRank values already associated with your website. This is important because search engine values associated with your homepage can devolve to your interior pages if you’ve got a good linking structure in place. There is also some value passed back to your site when people link to products that they like.
• Ability to create shopping feeds for Google Shopping (formerly Froogle) and engines like Shopzilla. Even though this isn’t strictly SEO, Google Shopping results appear near product searches, and there can be a tremendous amount of value in having a cart that feeds into major shopping engines.
• No Session IDs – Search engines have gotten better at figuring out how to get around Session IDs on pages, which can sometimes get ignored by search engines because they are seen as temporary pages, or indexed multiple times and considered to be duplicates. Whenever possible, use cookies or other ways of keeping your URLs free from excess IDs. Normally a session ID would contain identifiers like “sid,” “cscid,” or “phpsessid” in your URL along with numbers.
• Spaces for comments (assuming you want comments) If your users can review products, they are adding useful content to your product pages for free. Naturally, someone should review and moderate the comments to make sure that they are not overly negative or defamatory.
  Ability to add Google Analytics and other tracking software. Every page in the shopping cart should be able to include Google’s code snippet.

Before tearing out your current ecommerce cart and rebuilding your entire database, you might want to check with your vendor to see if updates are available. Most of the top selling carts have added new functionality that creates URL rewrites, controllable title and description fields, and product feeds. Even if you have to hire a programmer to make these features work, it can be a very good investment, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of products for sale.

What if you’re looking for a new shopping cart? Ask you salesperson for examples of sites that use the cart. You can then go to a search engine and use the site command to find out how many pages are seen by the engine. For instance, you can type in site:amazon.com and see 358 million pages. If a search engine can’t read shopping cart pages, it may only show a few pages from the site. Some shopping cart systems also generate the rest of the pages on the site, so it is very important to make sure that every page is represented for carts of this type.

The value of an SEO friendly ecommerce cart cannot be understated, especially when you’re just starting your online store. At Web.com Search Agency, we’ve seen some of the headaches that come with a pre-installed cart that can’t be modified or upgraded. The last thing you want to do is invest time and money in a new and better system because your old shopping cart is incompatible with search engines. Even though a search engine friendly cart is only one part of the ecommerce optimization equation, properly formatted pages can serve as several thousand extra representations of your site on a search engine. Given that people search for things in a variety of ways, you have the ability to cast a wider net when you’ve got a good ecommerce cart on your side.