SE Friendly Shopping Cart

Shopping cart script friendly to SEO

[Blue Gravity]

I've been asking around for the last few days from people in the SEO world if they know of a dynamic shopping cart script that is compatible with the art of search engine optimization. I know it's been a bit tough to optimize dynamic links, but is there a shopping cart script out there, that can use html tags or be able to dynamically stick keywords into the url instead of just random numbers and letters? I'd appreciate any feedback, both public and private on this subject.

[pleeker]

I'm not aware of any SE-friendly shopping carts, but I'm curious why you'd be looking for one? The general rule-of-thumb is that the shopping cart is the wrong place (too late) to be revealing new product information ... so I'm really curious on the need for an SE-friendly cart.

[bakedjake]

that can use html tags or be able to dynamically stick keywords into the url instead of just random numbers and letters?

I don't know of any pre-fab ones either. We rolled our own. It's lovely.

[bakedjake]

so I'm really curious on the need for an SE-friendly cart.

Interesting point, pleeker. I know a lot of web people use the terms "content management system" and "shopping cart" interchangably when it comes to e-commerce sites.

Generally, "shopping carts" are really "content management systems for e-commerce sites with a bunch of transaction features built in". I believe this was what the original poster was asking about.

i'm an idiot: sorry for the double post, mods

[danieljean]

I was similarly confused the first few times I saw "shopping cart" used here too. That some sell only a remote shopping cart not at all comparable to an e-commerce CMS yet call it the same thing only adds to the confusion.

I rolled my own too, and the Cart object is just a tiny part of the whole package, as well as one of the simpler ones. I guess we call cars "wheels" too...

The dynamic URLs do not seem to cause a problem for Google, as they are properly indexed. It would be nice however to have "cleaner" looking URLs, something a bit more intuitive for end-users and people that will link to you. The programmer in me thinks the SEO crowd tends to be very superstitious.

The things I am trying to add now are better titles and more content for some categories. I have just finished the Froogle feed, which hopefully one day will be useful.

[Rossv1]

Take a look at monstercommerce.com - I've been looking around for carts as well and they claim to be SE friendly, and have alot of related options.... I have no affiliation to them, just passing it along....

[web_cat]

Check out Nexternal Solutions I am about to make a decision on my own e-commerce needs, and I was very impressed by their system. They have a feature called the search engine friendly catalog export that creates an optimized static page for every product in their store. One of their reps took me through a demo and showed me a product in their Firstfairway Demo store called: british open towel. Then we went to google and did a search for that product. It came up #1 and #2. I have not seen another system with that type of result.

[edited by: lorax at 6:39 pm (utc) on Feb. 23, 2005]
[edit reason] removed URI [/edit]

[danieljean]

web_cat: that's not terribly impressive. Do a search for "british open towel" with the quotes, and you'll see there are only 8 exact results. If you took any 3-word query that was close to unique, most any shopping cart would do well.

[web_cat]

I was impressed because they showed me the search without quotes. I doubt most consumers looking for a product online perform a search with quotes. There are thousands of search results returned for British Open Towel without quotes, and they came up #1 and #2. Other products in their demo has simmilar results.

[danieljean]

Well the reason I mentionned the 8 results with quotes is that Google will more likely return an exact match even if you don't specify it with quotes, as it should be more relevant.

I have a number of unusual phrases for product titles. One I checked had 4 exact results, 907 broad matches. Even for the broad match, I am #1.

If you try Overture's keyword tool, you'll see they don't even have results for british open towel. No one looks for it, so no one optimizes for it. Unfortunately, people do not search for the exact product names. If the shopping cart placed well for "british open merchandise", that would be remarkable.

The real issue is whether the shopping cart will be indexed, and I can say that even with dynamic parameters such as productId=207, mine does. I conclude that the whole debate about whether those pages get indexed misses the point.

[icedout]

I am in the process of switching to shopsite.
Don't have experience to tell you yet as it's being worke on right now, their features are very SEO concsious and database pages are converted into static html pages for easier indexing.

[Rubylily]

I've been using CactuShop recently (an asp cart) and my site is being crawled and indexed no problem, especially by Google. I was previously using a very SE-unfriendly javascript cart, and I was very unsure about what to expect with the switch to a dynamic cart, but I have to say I'm more than pleased with the results, my rankings are now very good, if not excellent, and a vast improvement on what they used to be. So I tend to agree with danieljean here - dynamic carts, whilst not perfect, are not as much of an issue as you might think, it's what you do with it (in terms of your SEO copywriting etc) that's going to count.

[edited by: Rubylily at 10:49 am (utc) on Jan. 12, 2004]

[derekwong28]

I think what Blue Gravity was referring to was not whether the cart pages was indexible or not, but whether if indexed they can achieve a high search engine ranking.

This would mean having the correct title metatags and possibly a page url with the target keywords in them. It is also well known that html pages are more likely to be indexed by search engines than dynamically generated pages.

To my knowledge, the most reasonably priced SE friendly cart is Actinic catalog or business but it is not dynamically generated. The website has to be generated on one's PC before being uploaded to the webserver.

Many carts have modules which will generate an html pages including Miva Merchant. I am using the litecommerce version of x-cart. However, the page url will have the product title, but the title metatag will not.

I agree with Danieljean that nexternal demo is not impresssive at all. In any case, their pricing is out of this world for most of us whose monntly is below US$50,000. (They charge either US$250 or 3% per month)