Making Search Engine Friendly E-commerce Websites

Just imagine you had a birthday party, you cleaned up your house, put your best clothes on, got the cake out, put up your decorations and got all that food and drink out. Prior to this you sent out your coloured invitations on glossy paper, but at the last minute, there, under a pile of papers and a rather dozy sleeping cat. Shock! Horror! You realise you forgot to send out your invitations!

And as the big night comes, only a handful of guests came. The rest just verbally were aware you were having a party, but couldn’t work out how to get there and gave up sitting at home or made other plans instead.

It’s a bit like that when it comes to e-commerce, we sometimes just assume our visitors are coming to our site, after all we submitted our website to all the search engines and got numerous backlinks. Yet we haven’t gone the extra mile to tell our friendly search engine spider where we live.

This is especially true also for e-commerce websites, as these are generally dynamically generated webpages, it seems that most are not particularly search engine friendly or search engine optimized, that the masses may not be getting through. Its not like the masses are not there, they’ve just made alternative plans.

Tips for getting your e-commerce search engine friendly & search engine optimized:

The search engine spider needs to crawl through the site to index all the webpages. These webpages need to be presented to the search engines without a session ID and a query string. Also the product title should be in the filename for greater search engine success. A webpage address of http://www.mysite.com/productid=12456&search=t&PHPSESSID=da7946bbcd7673b5706d412da79bbfeb is not likely to be picked up in all the search engines, as the session ID will change with each individual visitor (and could end up with 100’s of variations of that webpage). But http://www.mysite.com/coffee_table_1234.php will. This can be achieved through direct hyperlinks through to the webpages or by using a dynamically created sitemap.

The title tags are one of the biggest factors in determining search engine success. Yet as most e-commerce sites are dynamically generated, there are many sites where the title tag is the same of all the product pages. Between the “” should be the product title, with the most important details followed by typically the model no. The same relevant details should be added for both category and static webpages within the site.

Each product, category & static webpage should individual Meta tags. Your e-commerce should allow you to enter individual meta tags for each product, or automatically create them from the product title & description. Though the majority of search engines grab information from the webpage, rather than the meta tags, the reality is that some engines still do use this information.

With these enhancements built into your e-commerce software, your e-commerce website has a much better chance of exposure in the search engines, have all your webpages indexed and accordingly will push up sales.