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Search Engine Friendly Shopping Carts (cont)
When someone does a search in the search engines, they first look at the titles
provided. If your page comes up first in the search engines and is among a series
of results that list off names of companies and your Page Title is reflected as
Mandarin Oranges the searcher will more than likely click on your link. Page
Titles allow for advertising the topic of your page and should be programmed to
correspond with the topic of your page.
When optimizing a page for a web site the Page Title is considered one of the
most important elements available to the SEO professional. Page Titles play
an extremely important role in proper optimization and should not be used
haphazardly.
URL Rewrites
URL rewrites are programming techniques that allow the returned URL to be more
search engine friendly by removing the question mark (?) and ampersand (&) from
the returned URL found in the location or address bar. This enables the search
engines to index the page without having variables or session id's interlaced into
the URL.
There are two types of URL rewrites. Each meet the same purpose, but the
advanced URL rewrite is more search engine friendly. The following examples
will give you an idea of the important factors.
Non-URL Rewrite URL
http://www.yourdomain.com/shop.php?cat_id=1&item_id=2
The above URL indicates to the database that the returned information should be
from the category with id equal to 1 and the item id equal to 2. This works fine for
the system because it understands the variables. Many search engines however
do not understand this form of URL.
Simple URL Rewrite
http://www.yourdomain.com/shop/1/2.html
The simple URL rewrite will take the URL and modify it so that it appears without
the question mark (?) and ampersand (&). This enables all search engines to
index your all of your pages, but still lacks in some important areas.
Advanced URL Rewrite
http://www.yourdomain.com/oranges/mandarin_oranges.html
The advanced URL rewrite enables your URLs to include your keywords. This is
another location search engines look for important information about your pages.
Being able to include keywords in your URL helps elevate your page to the top of
the search engine result pages.
Hidden Session ID's
Hidden session id's are not exactly hidden, but they are typically hidden from
view of the visitor and not placed in the returned URL. The links with session id's
include the question mark (?) and therefore can prevent many search engines
from navigating and indexing your site.
Some people attempt to defeat this problem with cookies, but cookies present
a different problem. Since some people are concerned with privacy issues they
block cookies and therefore are unable to shop if the cart requires cookies.
Session id's keep a temporary record on the visiting computer while keeping a
corresponding session number in memory or in a database.
Heading Tags
Heading tags are identified with the following HTML tags: <h1>, <h2>, <h3>,
<h4>, <h5>, and <h6>. The <h1> tag is the most important heading tag while the
<h6> tag is the least important.
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