January 4, 2007 Comments
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One of the biggest challenges for online retailers with small budgets is finding a program that will handle their e-commerce needs without wrecking their ability to optimize their web site for search engines. David Wallace addresses this issue in a great blog post about SEO friendly e-Commerce applications today over at SearchRank. In it, he outlines the features that you need to look out for when checking out your options.
David hits several areas that out-of-the-box programs often have trouble with. For example:
1. Title Tags - Does the application allow for unique title tags?
There is nothing worse than to come upon an e-commerce site in which all the title tags are the same. The application allows you to place whatever title tag you want but it is repeated throughout the site. Why is this bad? Because title tags are one of the most important contributing factors to how pages rank in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and therefore should not only be unique for each page but be relevant to the page as well.
Not only should your e-commerce application allow for unique title tags, it is an added bonus if they can be automatically generated based on the category or product name.
He goes on to discuss other important issues like navigation, site maps, meta descriptions and URLs and does a nice job of explaining both why the things are important and how a good program might deal with them.
If you are currently hunting for a search marketing friendly e-commerce package, this is a must read post.
Jennifer Laycock is the Editor of Search Engine Guide, an educational web site aimed at translating the search marketing world into something that small business owners can understand. Jennifer specializes in common sense search engine marketing, viral marketing and customer outreach via social media and blogs. A former search marketing consultant and in-house trainer, Jennifer’s clients have included companies like Verizon, American Greetings and Highlights for Children. Her primary clients now are a little girl named Elnora and a little boy named Emmitt.
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