The Original Shopping Cart Search Engine Optimization FAQ
Version 1.01: A Living Document
with a last Revision Date of 7/1/04 by Mike Randolph, Shopping Cart Guru.
The Original Shopping Cart Search Engine Optimization FAQ
is living document which will be updated frequently, that answers the frequently
asked questions we receive on improving traffic to eCommerce enabled Internet
stores. Except for the basics I’ll not be covering general topics that
have been well documented elsewhere and will instead focus on the task
of search engine optimizing shopping cart software products specifically. With
a careful understanding of the SEO topic I believe you’ll decide to use
our SEO Shopping Cart Software Solution, AbleCommerce.
SEO Hint $1 After
the blatant plug of AbleCommerce.com above I’ll remind you: Potential customers
are only one click away from doing research on a competitor’s product,
only one click away from exploring stores with an easier to navigate category
structure and only one click away from researching better shipping terms
at another online store.
Consider a few ‘first impression’ issues that are often overlooked:
Create and maintain a brand (look and feel) that represents your business
which is easily recognizable as yours. Use it for all your marketing materials
both on-line and offline. Consistent application of colors and font types
along with a quality logo are often the only notable difference between
a part time mom & pop store and a true brand or corporate identity.
Consider getting professional brand creation and design assistance during
this phase, if you haven’t already!
Learn from websites such as yahoo.com and google.com that
consistently create branded content in a visually pleasing manner while
consuming a minimum of time and bandwidth. Since inception Yahoo.com has
been particularly good at creating quality content (helpful web pages)
with a minimum of graphics. Yahoo.com continues to load quickly even with
the addition of compelling bandwidth intensive flash content.
SEO Hint $2:
Note the prominent use of text URL’s in the place of images or clever java
script menus for important links to sub-categories and products. The important
search engines won’t follow links included in fancy ‘drop down’ JavaScript
and/or DHTML menus.
Well conceived categorization of products with informative
product descriptions, flexible shipping terms, fast loading product pages,
secure payment methods and an SSL certificate tied to your domain are more
important than a ‘snappy’ flash presentation. Although once you have your
ducks in a row a 360 degree interactive flash presentation can’t hurt,
unless of course you’re marketing swampland in Florida!
Step one is critical to the success of your shopping cart
software-search engine optimized-marketing efforts! Get it right the first
time or you’ll find yourself repeating steps 2 to 10! Determine the keyword
sets your potential customers are typing into the search engines for
the products and services you sell. Your goal is to identify at least
30 different keyword sets.
SEO Hint $3 Customers won’t usually enter a single search term
as it results in many poorly targeted results. At Google.com the single
search term ‘ecommerce’ returns 17,800,000 results, ‘ecommerce
software’ returns 6,930,000 results and
‘ecommerce software hosting’ returns only 3,740,000 results.
Before starting the time consuming process
of re-writing your entire website be sure you’re doing it for the right
keyword sets!