While you may think that search engine optimization and E-commerce work in harmony together to achieve their set goals, the opposite is actually true. E-commerce sites are actually not SEO friendly, and are always beaten by other sites in the race for a top position in search engine results.
This is contrary to the purpose that E-commerce sites are actually developed for, and that is to promote a business through the World Wide Web in an effort to attract more customers. Not only that, E-commerce sites have a system that makes it possible for purely electronic transaction between the site and your customers without you having to deal with some problems or transactions directly.
That is the advantage E-commerce sites have over other business websites, which merely advertise products and require direct contract between the seller and possible customer in order to be able to close a deal. E-commerce sites, on the other hand, are capable of giving customers the convenience of being able to buy products from the site itself.
In an ironic twist, non-e commerce sites are found and indexed more easily by search engines than e-commerce sites. No matter how beautifully designed, or how user-friendly your e commerce site's design is, it actually loses against other conventional business websites in terms of search engine ranking. You could find yourself unable to pitch your sales because almost nobody visits your site, while your non-e commerce competition gathers audiences quickly and easily.
Shopping Carts Can Make or Break SEO Efforts
Shopping carts are used widely in e-commerce sites. They are created to provide consumers the ability to make purchases directly from the site itself. The concept of shopping carts, in its name, is designed to simulate the ability of shopping for groceries. You grab one item, put it in your cart, and move on. Because of this, the shopping cart system is oftentimes implemented in the whole site.
Shopping cart systems are made up of two components: the front-end site, and the administration. The former is the site that can be viewed by visitors and potential customers. The front-end site’s content is generated automatically by the software, and relies on the information that can found in the web site's database. These information, on the other hand, are inputted by the site administrator using the content management system included in the administration side of the e-commerce page.
Unfortunately, these carts are oftentimes the root of the problem itself. Most systems are not designed in a manner that search engine spiders will index the site favorably in terms of relevance to a query. The pages that come along with the shopping cart system are oftentimes not search engine friendly and are not easily found by the spiders. In fact, one would sometimes need to install add-ons made by third parties just to facilitate SEO.
Possible Solutions to the Problem
Since most shopping carts are not SEO-friendly, it is not a good idea to implement the system for your whole site. With the results this move could generate, choosing it would cause certain death for your business. So now, what next? You’re probably wondering how you could go about enabling your customers to buy your products directly while you maintain your site’s SEO factor.
The shopping cart can actually still be implemented within the site, but to be able to appear in a top spot among other search engine results, you must come up with a site that satisfies the requirements for being indexed by spiders. One way to do this is to create a separate site for the display and advertisement of your products, and not the front-end site included with the shopping cart software.
With a different front-end site, you now have absolute control on the pages’ design so that you can ensure SEO-friendliness. You now only have to make sure that the pages are designed in a way to maximize satisfaction of the different criteria in search engine ranking. These criteria include keyword and keyword theme density, where your site must contain certain keywords that have to be mentioned a certain number of times throughout the site in order to be considered relevant to a search. This front-end can then be implemented together with the shopping cart software because you’d still need it to facilitate e-commerce in your site.
Choosing Your Shopping Cart
One rule in maintaining a business is that you have to spend less than what you earn in order to record an income. This is one of the reasons that some businesses would opt to install those cheaper systems despite their non-friendless to SEO rather than the expensive ones in the market.
What they don’t realize is that even if the one-time expense for these shopping carts can be quite big, the benefits that would reap in the long run actually outweigh the costs because most of these expensive systems feature pages that can be easily spidered by search engines.
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