The purpose of any business website is to promote a product
or service online. The purpose of an ecommerce website is to
take it one step further and to allow your visitors to purchase
your products or services directly from your website. This model
has many great advantages over the non-ecommerce website in that
it allows for the generation of revenue with little-or-no time
spent in selling past the cost to have the website designed and
maintained, and it does not require the visitor to call you
during business hours thus helping secure the sale to an impulse
buyer. If your website provides all the information that the
buyer would want, you can save significant money in sales time
spent in that the visitor can find all the information they need
to decide to buy from you without taking up your time or that of
one of your sales staff. But ecommerce sites have a serious
drawback as well; very few of them can be properly indexed by
search engine spiders and thus will fail to rank highly.

A non-ecommerce website may have the disadvantage on not
being able to take the visitor's money the second they want to
spend it, however if it can be found on the first page of the
search engines while your beautifully designed ecommerce site
sits on page eight, the advantage is theirs. The vast majority
of visitors will never get to see your site, let alone buy from
you, whereas a non-ecommerce site may lose sales because they
don't sell online but at least they're able to deliver their
message to an audience to begin with. So what can be done? The
key is in the shopping cart you select.

SEO &
Shopping Carts

The biggest problem with many
SEO-friendly ecommerce solutions is that they are created after
the initial product. Shopping cart systems such as Miva Merchant
and OS Commerce are not designed with the primary goal of
creating pages that will be well-received by the search engine
spiders. Most shopping cart systems out there today are not
in-and-of-themselves even spiderable and require 3rd party
add-ons to facilitate even the lowest form of SEO-friendliness.
The money you may have saved in choosing an inexpensive shopping
cart may very well end up costing you your business in the long
run, especially if you are using your shopping cart as the
entire site, which we have seen may times in the past.

What Can Be Done?

There are essentially two solutions
to this problem. The first is to create a front-end site
separate from the shopping cart. What this will effectively do
is create a number of pages that can be easily spidered
(assuming that they're well designed). The drawback to this
course of action is that your website will forever be limited to
the size of the front-end site. Which brings us to the second
option: choose a search engine friendly shopping cart
system.

Finding an SEO-friendly shopping cart system is
far easier said than done. There are many factors that have to
be taken into account including the spiderability of the pages
themselves, the customization capacity of the individual pages,
the ease of adding products and changing the pages down the
road, etc. While I've worked with many shopping cart and
ecommerce systems, to date there has been only one that has
truly impressed me in that it is extremely simple to use, it
allows for full customization of individual pages and the
product pages get fully spidered to the point where they have
PageRank assigned. A rarity in the shopping cart world.

Easy As Apple Pie

Mr. Lee Roberts,
President of Rose Rock Design and creator of the Apple Pie Shopping Cart,
was kind enough to take the time to speak with me regarding how
he developed his system. Trying to get an understanding of how
this system was born I inquired as to what differentiated their
system from others. Without "giving away the farm", Lee pointed
out that his system was unique in that the search engines were a
consideration from the birth of this project. Rather than trying
to jerry-rig a system that was already in place, he initiated
the development of a system whose first task was to allow for
easily spidered and customized pages. A significant advantage to
be sure.

In further discussions he pointed out a few key
factors that should be considered by all when choosing a
shopping cart system. While more advance shopping cart systems
that provide for SEO-friendly pages may seem more expensive,
they save you the cost of developing a front-end site,
maintaining the pricing on a static page if one goes that route,
and of course - if all your site's pages are
easily spidered and you can then have hundreds of additional
relevant pages added to your site's overall strength and
relevancy you have a serious advantage in the SEO "game". If a
shopping cart system costs you an extra $100 per month to
maintain but it's use provides you with an additional $5000 in
sales that month did it really "cost" you $100?

What Lee
has effectively done is to provide a shopping cart system that
enables search engines to fully read and index every page.
Additionally (and perhaps because of his history as an
accessibility expert) the system is extremely easy to work with
as a user and as an SEO. And of course that's our primary
concern at Beanstalk.

Conclusion

It is not to say that the Apple Pie Shopping Cart is
end-all-be-all of SEO for an ecommerce site, if it was Lee
wouldn't be in the process of building a new version that will
include many new features for Internet marketing and tracking,
and we would be out of work. That said, if you've got an
e-commerce site or are looking to have one built, one must
consider what type of marketing strategy will be taken with the
site and if SEO is one of those, insure to find a system that
provides the same advantages as this one.

Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning
and provides guaranteed SEO services to his
clients. Visit Beanstalk?s blog to keep updated on the latest SEO news.