Search Engine Friendly Shopping Cart

Why Are Search Engine Shopping Carts Needed?

The objective of any shopping cart or e-commerce system is to allow visitors to
shop on a business site for products they want. Unfortunately, not all shopping carts are created equal and not all search engines are created with equal
capabilities. Some search engines are able to navigate through dynamic sites
while others are not. Sometimes the search engines that are able to navigate
through dynamic sites have problems indexing and navigating through the entire
site.

These factors eliminate many e-commerce sites from the search engine result
pages or hamper their advancement to the top. For a business to be competitive
on the World Wide Web, all of its pages need to be indexed and developed
correctly.

For the past 10 years programmers have been developing e-commerce systems
that required the sites to compete at the site level. This required many site
owners to find a company that could optimize their sites and create doorway or
landing pages that focused upon a product or category, or use any number of
other means to elevate the e-commerce site in the search engines. These tactics
have worked successfully, but the search engines want pages that are of unique
value to present to their clients. Dynamic sites hamper the model search engines
desire.

In order to meet the demands of the search engines and be indexed by all search
engines new techniques must be employed. These new techniques can make an
e-commerce system more search engine friendly, if they are developed correctly.
Some systems will never be search engine friendly and result in less than
adequate placement in the search engine result pages.

Why Are Some E-Commerce Solutions Not Search Engine Friendly?

There are many factors that come into play when attempting to determine if an
e-commerce system is not search engine friendly. These factors are important
to understand and can help you determine if the system is right for you.

CGI-BIN and Scripting Languages

Shopping Carts or e-commerce systems using the CGI-BIN format typically
utilize the PERL scripting language. When a search engine finds /cgi-bin/ in a
URL it typically ignores it. There are however some search engines that can
index beyond the /cgi-bin/element of the URL. However, there are many that
cannot and do not index beyond the /cgi-bin/ element.

Then we have the database driven shopping cart or e-commerce system that
operates on one of the more advanced Object Oriented Event Driven (OOED)
languages such as PHP, ASP, .NET, .JSP, or Cold Fusion (just to name a
few). These advanced languages utilize the question mark (?) and ampersand
(&) in the URL to identify the variables required to pull the information out of
the database and into the dynamically generated page. Not all search engines
are able to index beyond the question mark (?) or the ampersand (&) making it
difficult to be indexed by all search engines.

Meta Data

Shopping carts or e-commerce systems typically re-use the same set of Meta
keywords and Meta descriptions throughout the dynamically generated pages.
This simply means that an orange would have the same Meta keywords and
Meta description as an apple. Obviously this does not work very well for search
engines that utilize the Meta keywords and Meta descriptions. Meta keywords
and Meta descriptions should be based upon the product or the category.

Page Titles

Page titles are one of the most important elements in search engine optimization.
Page titles inform the purchaser that your page offers exactly what they are
looking for. Since many e-commerce solutions re-use the same page title which
is typically the company name or the site URL, it can prevent your site from
moving to the top of the search engine results. Each page should stand on its
own.

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