Which shopping cart you choose to use has an impact on how well your product and product pages will appear in the search engines.

Here's a few pointers that are critical to the success of any online e-commerce business.

Check how your shopping cart works! Some online shopping carts are coded in such a way that it actually prevents search engine spiders from indexing product pages, so even if your product phrases specifically match search criteria your products won't be listed in the natural search engine rankings. The opposite is those carts that allow spidering of the content to ensure you get listed.

Another key point is to ensure your cart generates keyword rich URLs for categories, products and key content pages. Try to avoid using product codes or references in the URLs as these are very difficult for the search engines to make any real sense of. For the best results use hypens and not underscores in the URLs.

ie http://www.twobelowzero.net/portfolio/e-commerce-site-for-a-kitesurfing-school

Remember this is only one part of a successful shopping cart, usability is just as important. Your products may be found and the purchase started but if the checkout and payment screens are not intuitive them you'll be seeing a high drop out rate in this process. Use Google Analytics to keep track of users through your site so you can see where they might be or are dropping out. 

And finally:

• Ensure your e-commerce solution also has some kind of automatic sitemap generator, so the search engines are aware of new pages and products when they are added.
• Meta tag and page title tags should either be editable manually or automatically generated from content so each page is unique.
• Try to avoid complicated carts in languages such as PHP or ASP. Where possible keep it simple so search engines can interpret the contents more easily.
• If you'd like to know more about the shopping cart solutions we offer, which do tick all of the above, why not drop us a line.