SEO friendly URLs for shopping cart software

Discussion for best structure of seo friendly shopping cart URLs

[arquan]

Hello,

I would like to hear opinions about the best structure for static URLs for shopping cart software with regards to search engine indexing.

For example:

mydomain.com/cart/product.asp/shoes/nike/index.htm

Do you think this structure is as good as any other? If not, what is your opinion that would be better and why?

Thank you.

[sun818]

The word cart and product is probably not necessary. What benefit would it have in terms of keyword optimization or as a communication tool to your customers. I'm still a firm believer that URLs should not exceed 70 characters. If a visitor forwards a URL to a friend, you don't want the URL to break in an outgoing e-mail. You also want the URL short enough to survive forwarded e-mails where the e-mail prepends the line with a "> ". As other merchants have discussed, there are many intellectually challenged individuals that shop online. So, designing your processes to minimize potential issues can only help you.

[FalseDawn]

As suggested, I don't think that URLs themselves will have much of an impact on your actual placement in the SE, but I guess a more human-friendly form is more likely to get the click.

I would suggest not having so many levels in the URL - something like domain/widget-brand-type may be preferable to
domain/widget/brand/type

SE *may* assign less weight to a link that appears to be buried several levels deep in your site.

[jsinger]

mydomain.com/cart/product.asp/shoes/nike/index.htm

To the extent possible, a site should be wide and not deep for both SE and human purposes. Few online shoppers are "dumb." Most are just trying to get in and out quickly. But I've certainly seen many "dumb" websites with cryptic navigation that requires far too much clicking to find a product.

Think of a wide site (with very few clicks but some scrolling) as a one-story Wal-Mart, versus an old- fashioned multi-story department store where shoppers are forced to move by elevator to the right floor.

mydomain.com/shoes/nike.htm

Isn't that better? And you better believe that URLs matter to SEs

[jsinger]

There was an excellent thread here recently about product search box navigation. Pretty much everyone agreed that far more shoppers navigate by drilling down thru levels than by using the text search to go directly to a product.

"Dumb" customers have learned what many web designers don't seem to know: text search often works terribly. (ours certainly is awful)

Moral: You shouldn't count on your text box to enable shoppers to find products. Traditional drill-down navigation remains vital. And the fewer levels the better.

[roban]

Assuming Apache is the server an .htaccess file can help with SEF url's

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}!-s
RewriteRule ^products/(.*) /index.php?act=viewProd&productId=$1

[arquan]

Thank you for the replies and excellent points. Just to make sure, I need to clarify one thing. There is a specific reason for needing a few 'extra' levels that are being discussed in this topic. The shopping cart software must reside in a directory other than the root, hence the directory /cart/. The product.asp, product.cfm or whatever the extension may be is the product detail page, and the additional directories are defined as the category structure(s) in the shopping cart administration. So if you have a category of shoes and a subcategory of Nike, that is where the additional levels come from.

So this is a dynamic e-commerce application with a static URL structure. A person certainly could enter fewer categories and end up with a structure that was a little flatter.

So, if we made the assumption that human behavior / intuitiveness did not enter into the equation for this discussion AND that the only consideration was achieving the best possible SE rankings, I want dig a little deeper into the first post by asking:

1. Knowing that this is a shopping cart software producing static URLs based on category structure, do you feel that the extra effort to eliminate the /cart/ is worthwhile with regards to better SERP?

2. Do you feel it would impact rankings one way or the other if the URL ended in something like nike.htm, index.htm, or /nike/ for example?

[dkubb]

With Apache's mod_rewrite the physical location of files doesn't have to map directly to the URL structure. With just a few lines of mod_rewrite instructions you can make the URL:

example.com/shoes/nike

map to:

example.com/cart/product.asp/shoes/nike/index.htm

I would drop file extensions and trailing slashes in URLs as well -- its an implementation detail the end user doesn't need to know about. In addition to making URLs less than 70 characters long I'd also recommend making them memorable and "hackable". By "hackable" I mean that if I go to example.com/shoes I should be able to view a list of all the show brands you carry.

Check out these articles with more guidelines on how to create URIs:

• Cool URIs don't change [w3.org]
  
• Choose URIs wisely [w3.org]
  
• URL as UI [useit.com]
  

[arquan]

DKUBB,

Thank you for the links, good reading.

[sun818]

If have control of the Windows web server, you can install third-party modules that allow you to rewrite URLs like the Apache web server can.

[Phil_C]

With windows/asp it's quite easy (if you have a reasonable knowledge of asp) to intercept the 404 error and do a server.transfer without the need to purchase any components.

For example, www.domain.com/shoes/ gets translated (via a database lookup) to www.domain.com/product.asp?id=123.

Some of the components I've seen still require some kind of id in the url, such as www.domain/com/shoes/123, which isnt as nice.