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Title: Shopping Carts and SEO
By: Author: Ross MacIver
Shopping and the Web. They go together like Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
Well, maybe not quite, but Internet shopping is one of the
fastest-growing industries in the world.
It's fairly easy to set up shop and sell almost anything from
bananas to banana boats on the Internet. Browse through the
shopping section of Google (Froogle) or Yahoo and you
can see the amazing variety of products that are available.
Click on a few of those links and take a look at the address bar
on your browser. Many online stores use some kind of dynamic
system for generating their pages. This means their product
information is drawn from a database and dynamically displayed.
Dynamically displayed pages look something like this:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=shopping+cart&btnG=Search
You will notice that there is no extension which would indicate
a static page.
Is there a problem with dynamic pages? From SEO perspective
there is a real problem. Search engines have trouble indexing
dynamic pages, especially with multiple variables.
Here is what Google has to say about dynamic pages:
"If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a
"?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider
crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep
the parameters short and the number of them few".
Shopping carts that use a lot of parameters will have trouble
getting indexed by search engines.
The Solution?
A client recently approached me to provide a shopping cart that
would allow his products to be indexed properly. In addition, he
had special requirements for the size and the cost of the
shopping cart. The cart needed to be as inexpensive and as small
as possible.
My client had previously been using PayPal "Buy it Now" buttons
but disliked the way the customer was immediately taken to the
PayPal site. He felt that would discourage people from making
additional purchases before checking out.
I investigated the various free shopping carts like Zen Cart,
osCommerce, and AgoraCart. They all offered some sort of SEO
modifications, but they were too large to fit in my client's
limited hosting account.
Digging a little further, I came across Commerce.cgi -- a
compact, fully customizable shopping cart. But free version did
not offer the features that my client desired. The pages are
dynamically generated, and there is no support for PayPal.
However, for a $50 lifetime membership, he had access to the
member's area which provided extra scripts for PayPal
integration. There is also a very interesting script for making
dynamic pages appear static.
This script, called Search Engine Advanced, uses the Apache
mod_rewrite function to change requested URLs. I checked with my
client to see if his Apache server supported mod_rewrite, and
that was in luck. All systems go!
Installing the Commerce.cgi script was quite straightforward,
and I could easily adapt the templates to match the style of my
client's existing web site. Once the cart was installed and
running, I tried adding the Search Engine Advanced hack. There
were a few complications, but the support staff at Commerce.cgi
helped me sort it all out.
The results are very pleasing indeed. All the dynamic pages
appear as static, and Google, Yahoo and MSN have started to
index the site.
You can see the site up and running at Tea From Taiwan - specializing in hand processed oolong tea.
I would highly recommend Commerce.cgi for anyone looking for a
highly configurable shopping cart. It is suitable for small to
medium sites and offers great support through their BBS.
About the author:
Copyright 2005 by Ross MacIverThis article may be redistributed freely on the Internet or in
ezines as long as the resource box and hyperlinks remain intact.
Ross MacIver is the director of Best Online
Content. We provide quality content for your web site and
offer a full range of design and SEO services.
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