promotion issues with e-com sites

what are the main issues?

[fom2001uk]

What search engine promotion issues do you have to take into account when developing an e-commerce site?

Dynamic pages and indexing (URL formatting, rewriting etc) is the one that immediately springs to mind, but what are the other important issues?

[pleeker]

Aside from the issues you mentioned, I don't think we generally approach optimization of a commerce site any different than an informational site. Search engines still want the same thing -- they want to know what every page is about.

I guess it also depends on the products you're selling to some degree. If your products are also available at dozens of other commerce sites, you'll have to go out of your way to make crawl-able pages for these products; present more in-depth information about them, etc. But you should do that anyway.

The main SEO-related thing I see being done wrong with commerce sites is too much focus on making the site crawler-friendly, and not enough focus on making it user-friendly. It's great if you get your site to the top of the rankings, but it's useless if your traffic doesn't convert.

[Ledfish]

As pleeker pointed out, the big thing with ecommerce is breaking away from the rest. In a saturated market it requires of course alot more to accomplish that. Also, branding is a big issue because in a saturated market, most of the traffic and potential sales will go to someone who has built a successful brand name. To get to their level, you'll not only be spending a lot of time, but a sizable amount of money as well. Remember, they have the revenues to run with the big dogs.

Secondly, friendly to crawls and friendly to the users like pleeker said is more of a balancing act than with an informational site. Look around and you will see dozens of sites that rank well, but navigation stinks, most often this isn't because your competitor is inept, it is because they gave up some user friendliness infavor of being more crawler friendly. You'll say you can build a better mouse trap, but most likely, you'll have to make some sacrifice as well along the way. If your lucky and good, you just might make better sacrifices than they did.

Good Luck