Search Engine (SEO) Friendly Ecommerce/Shopping Websites

Before you rush into an online store system you need to give some thought to how you will get visitors and hopefully customers to your site.

For most websites (and your online store is a website) the most popular method is the search engines.

Search engines can provide you site with two types of traffic -paid and free. If you are unfamiliar with these then see-An Introduction to PPC and an An Introduction to SEO for more details.

Requirements for Search Engine Friendly Shopping Sites

For you or a professional SEO consultant/company to optimize your web pages/site for the major search engines your store must be capable of being optimized.

Bizarre though it may seem not all shopping carts are capable of being optimized, or can only be crudely optimized.

The shopping cart should support:

• Ability to create unique meaningful and descriptive page names. e.g. nikon-digital-camera.htm is more meaningful than product1001.htm.
• Ability to create unique meaningful and descriptive page titles.
• Ability to create unique meaningful and descriptive page descriptions.

Although you will find shopping cart software advertised as SEO friendly the best way of checking is by visiting a few sites that use the software and taking a look at the web page source code (only the bit at the very top).

If you find unique page names, titles, and descriptions then it is ok. If not it may be that the particular site you are looking at hasn't configured it correctly so you may need to check a few.