Being an e-commerce developer I've worked with my share of the shopping carts on the market.  From PHP to ASP.Net and even the third party solutions like Yahoo e-commerce.  For all the work I've done over the past 5 years or so, I can say that I am now convinced that shopping cart developers are finally starting to not only understand SEO, but also to impliment it properly into their solutioins.   What supprised me the most, was how long it took most companies to get it right.  Lets take a look at a couple of the attemps to "get it right" that were really wrong.

 HTML Catalog Generation

The HTML catalog generation feature has been around the e-commerce industry for a while now.  Its used for two main reasons, 1 to create static HTML pages that search engines can crawl easier, and two to produce search engine friendly URL's to make catalog pages more accessible to search spiders.  This seemed like the logical thing to do at the time, but when we look back on this feature now, its kind of silly.  Not only does it waste server space and resources to host and generate the HTML catalog (which can take a while depending on the size of your catalog) but it really doesn't deliver any better results for search engines than a dynamic solution.  Now while I'm sure there may be a few other reasons this feature could be helpful to e-tailers, SEO isn't one of them.

 BAD Search Engine Friendly URLs

Just a short while ago, it became clear that if you want to be a player in the e-commerce world, you have to have search engine friendly urls on your store.  Because of this, developers who had never done any SEO work at all were told to implement this feature into existing shopping cart applications.  The problem we end up with was a poor solution created by someone who didn't understand the problem.  Below is a typical "bad" search engine friendly URL.

www.site.com/catalog/products/1/2/p-12323/cat/id/n/sku/AU2112/show/1/2

Developer are notorious for giving you EXACTLY what you ask them for (I know I am one)  and so, if you tell them you want a cleaner URL with no query strings, you might very well end up with URL's like that listed above.  The problem is, the developer just doesn't understand the point of SEO URL's.  Clean, simple and human readable is the key when it comes to search engine friendly URLs.  Bad SEO url's are nothing but a waste of time and money.  They aren't anymore accessible to search engines that regular dynamic urls, and they are just as ugly.  If you're going to pursue adding SEO URL's to your e-commerce site, you want to make sure its done right by somone who understands SEO.

 Let's stop being so negative and looking at the bad things, let us now take a look at some of the things that shopping carts seem to be getting right now.

Title/Meta Tag control

The ability to control the title and meta tags of an e-commerce page all the way down to the product detail level are crucial to SEO. When building an e-commerce website, you not only need to be able modify the title and meta tags of product pages, but you also need complete control over the product detail page.  This is the page you want search engines picking up, this is the page customers start the purchase process from.  So this page must be well representing when it comes to SEO.

Expanded Product Information

Being able to display all relevant information regarding an item on the detail page is crucial getting the page picked up by search engine.  The more content related to the product the better.  Remember, search engines love for a page to be an authority on a topic.  If you can make it seem like your page is the authority on a product, then its more likly to get pushed further up the search results page.

Customer Reviews

Providing customers reviews is a huge benefit to SEO.  As I mentioned above, the more content you have about a product the better, and what better way to get content than user generated reviews?   Customer reviews are so popular now that they are pretty much a standard feature in all of the major players in the shopping cart industry.  Not only do customers reviews provide a great means of content relating to the product, but they also provide a more human side to a website.

 So to wrap it up, there are a lot of things that should and should not be done to make your shopping cart more search engine freindly.  Hopfully this article has helped to point out a few of the good and bad.

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