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I posted earlier for information on shopping carts and am looking heavily at VirtueMart and CubeCommerce but would consider others as well. It is important that products listed in my store be searchable and show up on search pages such as froogle, etc. Do these do that?
I am not familiar with the two carts you mentioned but I know with a lot of shopping carts like osCommerce and Miva Merchant you can purchase (sometimes free) a module that will create a product data feed you can submit to Froogle.
There are also techniques to make your ecommerce site for search engine friendly, I do not know of any shopping carts that come out of the box that are incredibly search friendly. There are techniques, modules, and tweaks that will help you with this.
Word of advice, make sure you have short clear urls for all of your categories and product pages before you launch. If you want more details on how to do this do a search for dynamic search friendly urls. It is important to do this before you launch or Google will have to reindex you Web page over again if you do it after your launch.
hi there,
Have you tried the shopping cart / e-commerce software from Volusion (www.volusion.com)? they create search engine friendly URLs and enable easy crawling. One of these we know of that has recently used Volusion is a Halloween costume store, EasternToys (www.easterntoys.com) --- check out the structure of the URLs; Google has already crawled and indexed 100s of pages of this site.
You may also check out www.shopping-cart-reviews.com.
all the best
P.S: we have created a useful guide on various aspects of setting up an e-commerce / online retail business (free to access). it is located at www.internet-retailer.com . hope you find it useful.
Actinic Catalog has a Froogle feed and generates static HTML pages, so it's very seach engine friendly.
Plus you can also use htaccess to create static URLs as well to help you out.
Hi,
Have you guys looked at AspDotNetStorefront.com ecommerce shopping cart, I recently had a powerful presentation by Rob, CEO of ASPDotNetstorefront and we are signing up their development partner this guys have all the e-commerce features you need, it is search engine friendly, powerful backend and it is very affordable ....
The really good thing abt ASPdotnet Storefront, it is integrated with next generation Enterprise software from "Interprise suite" which makes it easy to upgrade in case your company grows ....
One thing I forgot to mention - you can also create a Google Sitemap that you can submit to Google as well.
Any shopping cart can be made search engine friendly as long as it does not output in javascript which is not indexed by search engines. Just use mod_rewrite (for PHP sites) to output search engine friendly URLs. Then make sure all of your Images have proper ALT text to help search engines.
From my experience with Open Source carts. All of them can be made SEO friendly. Cube Cart is the cart that I use the most. There is a free mod that will take out all of the language characters out of the URL's and make it more friendly to search engines. Couple that with a good sitemap and robot.txt file and you are on your way to getting more rankings.
Mark,
There is a fundamental difference everyone seems to be over looking.
Organic (Search-Engine-Friendly) vs. Inorganic (Channel Feeds)
Search Engine - Crawls around so see what it can find, free
Yahoo
MSN
Sales Channels - Need to be "fed" and most cost money
Froogle (FREE!)
Ebay
Amazon
Nextag
Shopping.com
Decide if you want to focus on organics, feeds or both, then go from there.
More features and channels = more money
Hello, yes, as we know, e-commerce is very hot and popular in the present market, of course, we are always douting whether on-line shopping is enough safe, yeah,the worry is necessary.
But I think the important is you should choose a great and excellent on-line seller. Indeed it is ture.
Rgds,
http://www.algogo.com
Camera,Cellphone,MP3/MP4,Electronics store
I'm a programmer and I know a litlle bit of SEO also. The thing is not about the shopping cart script to be SEO friendly ... it's about programming the e-commerce application in such way that the metatags are better read by the search engines.
I'm from Romania, and one of my works is www.magazinmobila.ro. When you check "mobila" ( = furniture) on google it's the first who comes up. Also the same thing for 80% of the products listed on the site. So I gues I done a great job, considering also that it has a Google page rank of 4.
Same thing for www.magazin-electro.ro - PR=3
and the list may fallow
This tipe of ecommerce applications (SEO friendly) are developed by http://www.webrainiacs.ro We have a demo shop that can be reached at
http://www.webrainiacs.ro/myvirtualshop
The bad thing is that their site is in roumanian too. But if someone here is interested in this please email me and I will assist you futher.
Well, again I am talking about x-cart. It features being able to SEO each category. Export the cart to a static HTML catalog.
Depending on what language the cart is written in, most can be made SEF especially if Apache is the server. A simple addition to the .htaccess file can achieve this in many cases with a re-write rule. Even without any modifications a site will be indexed given enough time and nothing can take the place of good content, managed key words and good, old fashioned organic SEO. There is no 'little white pill' for good ranking.
If you are selling plasma TV's you will have a much harder time of it than someone who is selling a unique product and has researched the market for that product. If there are 40,000 searches per day for plasma TV's where do you think you'll rank? If you're not in the top 10 (and you won't be) it's like you don't exist at all. On the other hand if you sell left handed widgets and there are only 10 searches per day...guess what?
I use Cube Cart on my vitamin site and there is a free SEF mod that helps take out all the nasties and allows me to enter browser titles and meta information for each category and each product. A very handy utility.
Everyone seemed to post on Cube so I will write to your other option Virtuemart. There is osCommerce as an original Open Source Cart. From there you have several options for carts including the leaders CRE Loaded and Zen Cart which give you bundles of prepackaged osCom installs (and I would recommend those over a standard osCommerce site). Now besides the carts there were Content Management Systems, such as Joomla and Mambo (still seem the same to me…but Zen and CRE are only just now starting to have some true differences).
Some users liked the CMS’ but they wanted to keep these and THEN get a cart. That is where you get Virtuemart. It is a GREAT shopping cart…or CMS turned shopping cart system. It is basically a Joomla/Mambo platform with the osCom module inserted.
What is the point of the history lesson? Since they are all connected to open source and the osCommerce cart they can ALL be made SEO friendly. If they do not have it already all you would need is the SEO Friendly URL contribution and a Site Map (spider food) contribution. Others can recommend more, but this is the core of what you need. The cart already comes with the Froogle feed, and you can get the new Google Base install as well or have custom files created for other Inorganic SEO work.
So…if it is open source…YES…it either is or can easily be SEO friendly (they can be indexed without the site map and SEO URLs but they really do help and are worth having). Now....that doesnt mean you slap the site up and your products appear on page one of google....but you have what you need to get there.
We use Virtue Mart on our webshop at Mingos.nl and our individual products can be found with Google. The manual of Virtue Mart can be found on the website listed in my signature.