I really need your opinion about a seo friendly shopping cart

seo friendly shopping cart

[fdstd]

Hello

My name is Dan and I'm new to this forum. I want to open an online store this year , most probably in February - March 2007 and I have a few questions before I do that since I never administrated one before. I need an , I don't really know how to name it, the best "seo friendly" shopping cart script. The only script that I know is osCommerce but I've looked over hotscripts dot com for others and I liked following ones : cs-cart , squirrelcart, sunshop, digishop, viart, in-commerce and avactis. Their demos looked great from my side of view but here comes the real issue: which one is the best "seo friendly" one?

I'm worried about this since the region were I live now doesn't have such websites and I really need to attract some potential customers from web searches, the shopping cart script + an adwords campaign should return good results in a couple of months. I don't mind if I have to pay for the script or if I have to use a free one. I can handle the administration part (I saw the most scripts have almost the same admin panel and they are very easy to configure).

Please take 1 minute and post your opinion about the best "seo friendly" one. The security must be good too, I won't process credit cards (yet) but in the future it might be a possibility to do that, but I want the script to have at least medium grade of security against mysql attacks and other vulnerabilities.

Sorry for my poor english, it's not my native language.

I'm waiting for your thoughts about this.

Best regards and a Happy New Year

[edited by: lorax at 1:00 pm (utc) on Dec. 26, 2006]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]

[Expected Man]

seo, seo, seo

That means search engine optimization, you have to learn as much as you can on how to rank well on organic searches for your most related keywords.

I would suggest oscommerce, you can make it the way you want to by installing contributions, search engine friendly urls, meta tags etc

Then, know which product you selling, have good descriptions, clean pictures, and competitive prices. Make sure you have good content on the pages, optimize for at leat 3 keywords a page that online visitors actually look for etc

In general thats what you need, then work hard, focus and patience.

Good luck

[lorax]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

You might want to read this thread [webmasterworld.com] at some point in your search. It's not specifically about SEO but it covers a lot of eCommerce issues.

[red_gorilla]

Hello Dan. I don't run any stores right now but i have designed dozen of them using open source scripts. So you can do good SEO using creloaded, oscomemrce and zencart. But you need install additional contributions and modules. I have no experience yet with other scripts you mentioned but i think you can select one of this 3 for you first store (This 3 are all php driven stores). They have really good community so it will be easy to find developers and designers to work with. As for me zencart is better and more easy. You need at least Ultimate SEO that will make you url SEO friendly. You can also look for commercial X-Cart but it's almost equal to zencart.

[fdstd]

ok how about this: should I look for a cart with static urls feature? does this help alot in seo?

[The_Hat]

We use a php cart called squirrelcart.. it seems to be spidered pretty well...

[benevolent001]

and please reconsider your credit card decision , you might loose many customers, you may use google checkout for this its almost free when you use adwords

[Essex_boy]

Checkout Geniecart for SEo or actinic if you have the money to spend.

[davidgid]

I have been using zen-cart for a couple of years now. Zen-Cart is open source and very stable. I would recommend it. I decided against using their seo friendly urls. Mainly because by the time someone wrote the mod I already had backlinks and I did not want to take the time to do all the 301s and backlink chasing to get webmaster to update links.

Besides the seo friendly urls zencart does a lot of the other stuff fairly well. They use h1 tags on product names and they create a site map. They also have froogle feeder mod already created as well as a google site map mod.

The biggest things to consider is finding your keywords, getting backlinks, creating good copy, and living and breathing seo. Seriously, the old adage “build it and they will come” does not apply to the web. If you are not going to constantly study, seek to write better copy, and hunt backlinks then your online store will be much like the other 10s of 1000s of online stores that will fail this year.

Honestly, not having SEO friendly urls has made me a much better seo. You can have a successful store without starting off with the best cart.