optimising an e-commerce store - help

Posted By: luka ()
Posted On: 2003-Jun-28 12:44

Hi,

I've read a few posts on optmising dynamic pages and they have been very helpful.

My question is how to optimise when you are using an off the shelf e-commerce system, specifically the cart from www.lynxinternet.com, an asp based system

I can use different templates for each product category and have access to the <head></... of each template, so titles and meta are editable.

I called their support and they tell me that URL re-write isn't available altough they don't use to many variables in the URL.

One weird thing though is that whatever page I go to the URL in the browser still stays the same 'www.domain.com' although when you roll over links the status bar tells you the proper URL.

What is the best way to approach the optimisation and what are the limits?

Note: each category serves a different industry so their is no point optimizing the home page by adding a static page etc.

Is it possible to offer quality SEO in this case or not?

thanks in advance
Luka.

Posted By: excell (Staff) Posted On: 2003-Jun-28 17:07
Do we have a similar question thread to link this into folks? Has anyone else used this product and been able to customise it to satisfaction?

Posted By: atozcom ()
Posted On: 2003-Jun-29 03:02

I have a "off the shelf" shopping cart that uses I have customized to have dynameic title, desciption and keywords tag. This shopping cart is designed in such a way that it also is optimized for google.

Take a look at the shopping cart of my online store in my web site in my profile. My dynamic page rank very well in google. Take a look at the code each product page has it own optimized title, desciption and keyword tag.

It is entirely possible to have a custom SE optimized dynamic category page for each category and custom SE optimized dynamic product page for each product.

Posted By: luka ()
Posted On: 2003-Jun-29 09:17

Thanks very much atozcom,

I looked at the code and it seems that the cart produces some decent code.
When you say the cart is optimised for google what exactly do you mean, or what kind of modifications have you made.

Also would you be able to tell me which cart you're using so I can have a look behind the scenes,

Anyway thanks a lot that, gives me abit of confidence,
The product pages on the site I'm working on are just about spidered.

What tracking system are you able to incorporate in such pages. (Hitslink, NetTracker ??)

Luka

Posted By: atozcom ()
Posted On: 2003-Jun-29 18:07

Luka,

"optimised for google" means, the shopping cart is customized for google search engine with my Google SEO experience.

I have program into the shopping cart the factors that is important to achieving google ranking in terms of placement of keywords, tags (title, desciption, keywords, alt, h?...).

I just finished a new version that I have also programed in dynamic links, navigation and site structure. I even have a feature that would likely get Google to visite more often because of automatic site updates on several pages.

Most shopping cart do not have SEO in mind. My new shopping cart is design for search engine in mind.

For web site tracking, my web host offers DEEPMETRIX LiveStats 6.2.

[ Message was edited by: atozcom 06/29/2003 10:08 am ]

Posted By: upwordz () Posted On: 2004-Jun-30 18:28
Hey atozcom, Could you share what shopping cart you are using now? It sounds like a great product. My company is investigating new ecommerce software and the SEO features you described are one of the more important features we are looking for in a product. Thanks!

Posted By: OAC (Staff)
Posted On: 2004-Aug-06 02:16

There are a number of carts/web stores that offer these features either out of the box or with inexpensive add-ons. Miva Merchant with OpenUI is one. Bizar Shop is another. Obviously atozcom's is another. There will be plenty of others. Due to demand by their customers, either the cart/web store developers have been forced to cater to search engines (after all, most store owners are not going to persist with a cart/store which does poorly in search engines) or third party developers have created modules which enable search engine optimization.

My point is not to lose sight of the other functionality of well developed carts/stores - many of them have a boatload of functions additional to basic carts/stores, available either out of the box or through inexpensive modules. eg marketing functions such as upsale products and automatic volume discounts (quantity and/or value)and shipping and payment functions eg freight by shipping zone (country, zipcode, state) by weight, volume or quantity, which exactly meet the requirements of your store.