Choosing an eCommerce platform can be a terribly frustrating experience because of the options and packages available, the misinformation, the pushy sales reps, the time and money investment, and so on. I want to talk about this decision because of this experience, but I don't plan on making any platform recommendations. No, no. That's really up to you and the resources available to you. But I'm happy to give you a rundown of the SEO elements you'll want to consider in your decision making process.
If you're not in the market for a new eCommerce platform, maybe some of these common platform missteps will convince you that it may be time to consider.
Proper Product Image Handling
Your product imagery can provide awesome conversion benefits and make a strong differentiator in your niche. Unfortunately, a lot of eCommerce platforms don't provide the necessary control and commit a lot of SEO missteps (like generating a new URL when the product images are cycled).
Images that create new URLs is a big no-no. Vat19.com's Giant Gummy bear page passes this test as the URL doesn't change when the delicious image is changed.
Page-Level Control of Head and Meta content
Sure, it makes sense for your title tag, H1, and image alt attribute to default to the product name, but if you don't have the option to create custom meta information you could be in for some frustration. One should be able to edit titles, H1s, image alt attributes, meta descriptions, etc. from every product page in the admin.
Additionally, it's important that the content in the HEAD section of each page is editable. If I want to drop a Google Website Optimizer script onto one product page, it shouldn't be impossible. The same goes for adding a rel=canonical, meta robots, or a page-specific JavaScript snippet.
Product Reviews
Product reviews are awesome for conversion, and it seems like many eCommerce platforms today offer some sort of built-in review system. Reviews can also have a positive impact on your product pages' rankings with the naturally keyword-rich UGC it generates. Unfortunately, tons of product reviews systems utilize JavaScript to call the reviews after the page loads, providing no SEO benefit.
Fortunately for Amazon, this review is seen by the Googlebot because it's rendered in HTML
To make sure your product reviews are search engine readable, view source on a page with reviews and be sure the text appears in the code.
Robust Sitemap and Product Feed Control
Most modern eCommerce platforms submit Sitemaps to the search engines, but there's so much more that can be done. For instance, segmented Sitemaps is an awesome way to monitor indexation of different sections of your website. If your platform doesn't allow you to adjust your Sitemaps, you'd be missing out.
Additionally, product feeds allow you to submit your products to comparison shopping engines like Google Merchant Center, NexTag, Shopping.com, and many more. Google Merchant Center is the big one; an eComm platform that auto submits to GMC opens up more possibilities to appear for queries that trigger products in blended search, as well as product extensions for PPC advertisements.
You want this. Your eComm platform should allow it.
301 Redirects, True 404 pages, and Other Rewrite Control
Some of the hosted eComm platforms allow no control over 301 redirects and URL rewriting, and this is a big problem. Similarly, many platforms don't send a proper 404 status for a dead page, opting instead to 302 redirect to a (status 200) 404.html, or worse, the homepage. As products are removed from your catalog, you should be able to 301 redirect that old URL to a related product, or send a proper 404 status message. Anything else will cause confusion for the search engines AND users. Lastly, and most obviously, URLs should be rewritable to allow for keywords-richness.
Contrary to the friendly message, everything is not ok. This "404" page is seen just like any other resolving URL by the search engines. Header checker courtesy of Andy Stratton's checkmyheaders.com.
Filtered Navigation that Doesn't Suck
Faceted or filtered navigation is a contentious point amongst eCommerce platforms as very few platforms do it exactly the same.
First and foremost, a filtered navigation that relies on parameters and session IDs can be very difficult, if not impossible to build in an search engine friendly manner. In many cases, the Googlebot could waste a ton of your crawl bandwidth crawling in and out of navigational filters. Additionally, it can become a information architecture nightmare, with the Googlebot crawling deeper and further from the homepage to reach product pages.
A more modern approach to faceted navigation is through using AJAX to filter products. Just make sure that there's an HTML crawl path to your products, and you're not hiding any really good organic landing pages within your AJAX navigation.
There's a lot of ways to approach this issue, and its worthy of its own discussion. See Rand's Whiteboard Friday on the matter. The general rules for a search friendly faceted navigation:
- Keep the crawlers from crawling endlessly through filters. Remember, rel=nofollow and canonical don't preserve crawl bandwidth.
- Don't hide great organic landing pages from the crawlers by using AJAX. AJAX is ok, as long as there's an alternate path to pages you'd like to rank.
- Robots.txt can be used as a solution but must be done carefully (for example, creating a rule to disallow access to URLs with 2 or more parameters/filters).
Site Speed
At this point I'm really more concerned with site speed from a conversion standpoint, rather than as a ranking factor, but there's reason to believe site speed will see increased importance in the algorithms' future. An advanced cacheing ability is a must for the modern eCommerce platform.
A few more SEO elements
- Automatically generated but manually editable HTML sitemap.
- Simple breadcrumbs. Preferably generated in a way that triggers Google's enhanced snippet:
- Navigation that non-JavaScript users (and crawlers) can navigate. Image-based navigation should use alt attributes or css image replacement. See Amazon's approach with css, images, and JavaScript disabled visible on the right:
- DNS control to allow CNAMEs, content delivery network integration, subdomain usage, etc.
- Customizable (or no) file extensions in URLs. domain.com/product/ rather than domain.com/product.php.
- Blog integration on a subfolder. If this isn't possible and your blog has to go on a subdomain (or worse, another domain entirely), that could be a sign of even more frustrating control issues.
Some Non-SEO elements
There's obviously TONS of non-SEO related features that should be included in a good eCommerce platform. Here are just a few.
- Strength in Numbers and Extendability - At some point your eCommerce platform will frustrate you for one reason or another, and you'll feel a lot better if there's a vibrant community and developers building extensions behind it to help.
- Data Portability - Can you export and import all of your data from the admin? If one of your manufacturers makes a change to all of their products that requires a small edit to all of their descriptions, can this be done simply? And what about a few years later when you're ready to move to a new platform?
- Internal Site Search - Your platform should definitely have a strong internal site search functionality, or at least allow for full integration of a third party's search solution.
- Updated, but Not Too Often! - When was the last time your platform updated? 3 years ago? Well, a lot has changed since then, I'm not sure I'd trust that. At the same time, updates every other week can be extremely frustrating.
- Great Checkout Process - We'll leave what "great" actually means to the conversion rate experts. Needless to say, this is a HUGE differentiator for eComm platforms. I'll also lump advanced control of shipping rules, gift cards, and coupon codes in here as well.
That's Everything! </sarcasm>
I don't envy the engineers behind today's eCommerce platforms. They're tasked with building a system that's both simple yet robust, 'just gets out of the way' yet 'all-in-one', user friendly yet secure, and so on. No fun. I don't expect that I've covered every bit of must-have functionality either, but I hope I've got most of it. If you've got any particularly frustrating stories from dealing with your eCommerce platform, follow me on Twitter and let me know, or sound off in the comments.
Obligatory "You Forgot Feature X" Updates:
- From @yoast: support for rich snippets. Google recently added eCommerce sites to the list of sites that can utilize rich snippets. Fortunately, if your GMC feed is properly set up, you may not have to do anything to take advantage.
- From @dergal: Analytics. I left built-in web analytics out originally because I'm a die-hard Google Analytics junkie, but if done well it can be a nice feature to have.
If you are a big merchant with tons of products to sell (let's tell: Amazon size), I still believe that the best way to go is to create your own eCommerce platform. That way you can customize all the SEO related factors without needing to upgrade, explore, test and retouch the thousands of module/components/plugins the open source enviroment produces.
But if you are a small to medium size eCommerce, it is faster to go with one of the many Open Source/"Cheap" eCommerce platform.
My three eCommerce musketeers
Surely Magento is the most powerful of all (and it has also an Enterprise version, which is all but free), but sometimes it can be overwhelming for the all the things it offers and the addons you can access to. Do you know the sensation when you enter the in Apple App Store? The same with Magento addons.
Anyway, I strongly suggest to optimize your Magento following this SEO for Magento Guide you can find in the Yoast's blog.
Other two very good alternatives, IMO, to Magento are:
Prestashop
It is a little bit easier to use than Magento, but still solid. It has a great community behind which complement the core of the platform with very good addons. And if you are or have access to good devs, it can be tweaked quite easily in order to optimize is already quite good SEO components. Just for information, exists a SEO Module for Prestashop (not for free), that respond to many of the needs listed in this post by MikeCP
CS Cart
It is not a free platform, but its price is far from being prohibitive.
Even though is not the one I prefer of the three I'm proposing here, I've to tell that it is quite good on the SEO side. Especially, it allows to personalize and rewrite your URLs both automatically and manually, which is perfect when you really want to optimize that SEO factor.
Ok, but...
Even though I don't have really too many complaints to do against them, I am not particularly fond of the VirtuaMart eCommerce component for Joomla and the eCommerce plugins for WordPress.
In the first case, because to optimize VirtueMart for SEO you have to rely also in other components (JoomSEF or SH404Sef) and their related addons.
In the case of WordPress, because the plugins - apart from not being really thought for the European (or at least Italian/Spanish) legislation about eCommerce - IMO are not so heavy in managing thousands of products. But, probably, I say so also because I cannot stop thinking to WordPress as a blogging platform :)
The eCommerce SEO Nightmares
Maybe also in this case it is a question of feeling, but really I get nut when I've to work with OsCommerce and ZenCart (no, I don't like it).
Sweet Gianluca! Wish I could give you a bunch of thumbs up for the suuggestions and comments. on carts
I'm not sure anyone has mentioned the news about Magento - but they just recently launched Magento GO, their hosted Saas model. It relieves the fortitude of headaches that hosting/maintaining your store using Magento can cause. I was one of the beta testers and although it's new, it's a pretty nice system.
I have worked with ZenCart and a little OSCommerce. I chose MagentoCommerce because they have a team of programmers behind their open source platform. As far as I knnow, ZenCart and OScommerce are on a volunteer programmers whereas Magento Commerce has a lot of employed programmers behind their system. Also for anyone running ASP, I recommend aspdotnetstorefront.
I've run a Yahoo Merchant Solutions store for over ten years and the built in SEO is rather good. There's also a large user community and a decent number of 3rd party developers to customize things to your hearts content, including SEO improvements. However YMS is lacking in the URL rewrite ability and redirects are a nusiance at best.
Interesting post and timely. I'm doing some pro-bono work for a West Seattle startup and my experience with ecomm platforms is minimal at best. You've called out some really important things to consider that could easily be overlooked. Here are some thoughts I had while reading your post:
Styling: The first thing I expected you to call out was ease of styling. I've seen many people grumbling about platforms that make it a real challenge to roll your own site design. That would drive me nuts and could potentially be a huge time suck.
Inventory Management: No store owner wants to have to manage their own inventory. I suspect this is standard on almost every ecomm platform, but it isn't uncommon for me to run across people trying to bend Wordpress to their ecomm will.
International Customers: Billing and shipping to international customers can be tricky. I'm not entirely sure how this is integrated into an ecomm platform. But, if I was setting up a store, I would certainly want to know if it was an option. (maybe you're considering this to be part of the great checkout process?)
I agree 100% with the Inventory Mangaement Control. My 1st eCommerce site didn't have that feature and I ended up selling more product than I had in stock. Althoug it sounds like a great problem to have, it was a nightmare. Inventory thresholds should be a MUST HAVE feature. I use magento commerce for my platform. There are pugin too for SEO.
A complete integrated ecommerce solution is key to making sure your site runs effectively. Here at Dydacomp, a number of our clients have seen a huge difference by adding inventory management to their ecommerce solution. It has allows them to streamline the process and prevent wasted time spent trying to manually management inventory, not to mention it helps to reduce the risk of human error tremendously.
Great article! Thanks for sharing this!
Molly Griffin
"As products are removed from your catalog"
I'd say, don't do this. When you no longer carry an item that doesn't mean you should remove it entirely. Just remove it from standard navigation, and move it over into an archive. Let Google find the archive, but make sure the juice to it is low (you don't want it to outrank pages where current products are). On these archived product pages, make sure you display some similar, current products that you have in stock saying something like - "we don't have this, but these might be of interest". I've simplified the explanation, but here are the benefits:
You might be surprised how many people search for old products. Why not retain that useful content. The visitor get's either the information he/she is after, or gets a good alternaive option to purchase.
It's an interesting idea and great for smaller sites. For bigger sites, not so much. Some sites add literally hundreds of products a day, and it would be a nightmare to have thousands of outdated and old-spec products hanging around every season. They could potentially confuse customers and also confuse Google into not understanding which product pages need to be prioritised as older pages often take preference. I could also see lots of companies getting calls about when they're going to get 'XYZ old product' in. - Jenni
In the past I've worked with a few companies who have struggled massively with SEO and their ecommerce platform. One spent over a year rebuilding theirs; another decided not to as it was going to cost them over £200k. Just goes to show how important it is to decide on a good platform in the beginning, know exactly what you need and not cut corners. - Jenni
I have the luxury of working with a shopping cart I've built from the ground up. So when ever some thing SEO pops up I can usually customize the cart to what ever standard I need.
The thing I have noted is within my day jobs industry we are probably the lowest when it comes to in bound links, but the advanced on page SEO usually has us ranked in the top 3 for most of our products.
We actually used a 3rd party cart initially 6 years ago but every time we turned around it was binding us from doing what we wanted to do.
Agreed. Clearly it's not an option for everyone - and sometimes it may take longer to edit things yourself and make sure you haven't broken your checkout process for any possibly scenario - but sometimes that is worth the cost of full ownership and freedom.
I don't agree with the absolute statement that individual URL's for colours are total no no.
We do a lot of work with fashion sites and searches including colours are very common (e.g. white linen trousers).If your site inventory doesn't merit a whole landing page for this search, the product page has to provide it.
There is also a usability issue that by putting all colours under a single page with some sort of gallery, the product listing pages and on-site search results aren't showing what the customer is looking for.
In the above example, someone looks in the trousers category, sees a pair of navy ones and skips right past. The argument that you can show swatches and the like just doesn't wash, I've seen live eyetracking studies on these pages and they're not enough to engage the user.
I appreciate the latter is a usability issue , not SEO, but if you get your traffic up, but your conversion drops, you're back where you started after alot of work.
Absolutely agree. If the search volume for "{color} widgets" is there, there should be separate URLs.
Now, whether there is one product page with swatches that generate new URLs, or just altogether separate products, that depends on quite a bit.
Totally agree. The product and the layout can often warrant unique URLs for each color variant.
great post really..but how come no mention of RDFa\goodRelations\Google Micro formats?
I had a quick post on my blog if you like to check out.
https://www.sefati.net/2011/01/rdfa-and-google-microformats/
Great article! For a quick look at choosing the right shopping cart, take a look at this infographic my team put together! It includes a lot of the same information in graphic form.
> Internal Site Search - Your platform should definitely have a strong internal site search functionality, > or at least allow for full integration of a third party's search solution.
Dont forget to noindex your search results pages :)
Thumbs up for an really comprehensive post on ecommerce SEO needs Mike.
What would be a fantastic follow up would be a post on exactly which shopping cart solutions come close to meeting the requirements you layed out.
I'll bet if you included WordPress and Joomla solutions, the post would get a massive amount of inbound links.
Heh. Believe me, I was tempted to go down the route of building a checklist for each eComm platform. I think it'd be incredibly useful. I still may in the future, but I'm not prepared to take on the amount of work involved, at the moment.
I think if someone WERE to do this, it'd be important to setup a test store for each platform, rather than just working off the features that a platform SAYS it has.
I had seen a grid diagram like this in the past but I was a noob and it's been a long while. Now if I saw a diagram like you said, my first question would be who did the research and what's their end...
I will link for sure if the post will mention Word press.
Thumbs up for Word press :)
you might also need these
- RSS feed. This way if you plan to run an affiliate program, affiiliates can convert those product RSSes into pages with their referral code
- Canonical URL. With all the tricky programming rewrites, its best to assign a canonical url on all your pages. This way even when this page loads > https://www.yourstoreshoppingcart.com/products/mugs?color=red , search engines will always see it as https://www.yourstoreshoppingcart.com/products/red-mugs.html
- Print only version. This is mainly for customers who wants to print the page and show it to their boss before deciding to buy them.
- Zoom image.For all those who love detailed images
- Twitter/Facebook share/like buttons. This way customers/people can always tweet/share your website right away.
hope this helps :)
Great post Mike! Thanks so much for the helpful tips. I'm looking at running a platform like Volusion or some of the similar all-in-one packages, and while they get some of the SEO right from the start, it always seems like there's still a lot to do. Very helpful!
P.S. I'm going to save these tips in my SEO sarcophagus for when I become the next SEO pharaoh.
What's that? When you surpass the 10.000 mozpoints limit and become more than an Oracle?
You are incorrigible. Ridiculous, even.
Volusion recently launched a new version of its software, V11. You can see the features here. It includes advanced SEO tools to help a merchant start off on the right foot with SEO. If you have any questions as you are working with the platform, don't hesitate to contact us. We also love feedback!
Thanks for the info. No surprises but some great reminders. It would be great to see a review of the "best of" ecommerce to see on a chart basis the ones that pass the SEOmoz muster, and still are affordable for small shops.
I have recently taken over a Magento based e-commerce operation and would like to warn of another issue.
Magento can create up to 4 versions of the same product page, resulting in not only duplicate content but in some cases 1000's more pages than wanted... I would recommend anyone working on the Magento platform to look into this on their forum.
For me content is the key issue for achieving good results, especially when you sell products that have model codes. This is because there will be many other sites with the same descriptions. Google (well Matt Cutts) recently announced more changes to their algorithm, with further emphasis on penalising duplicate content.
Employ someone to add unique and descriptive descriptions to both products and services, and if possible delivery, privacy and terms & conditions pages.
Go to admin > system > config > catalog > SEO and select yes for Canonical Link for cat and product pages
Yes we tried that and there were still products that had already been indexed at the root, so we had /product and /category/product. Magento should have a redirect set-up like wordpress for when you switch from one to the other!
Go to Magento Connect under SEO. There are add ons. MAKE SURE to read the reviews. Back up your DB just in case you have problems. I wouldn't recommend the free SEO plug ins.
Mike, great post. Is there a platform you prefer / recommend?
KevinDP, some stats for most used ecommerce platforms from latest Ahead Work charts (only shops in top 1 million in alexa, Ahead Work are magento developers :) ). Place one for magento with about 25%, place two for zen cart with about 13%, place three for virtuemart (joomla extension) with 12.5%, fourth is prestashop, 5-th is oscommerce.
All online stores - not in top 1 million in alexa ranking: place one and two for zen cart and oscommerce, place three for virtuemart, than prestashop and magento. (source: scraping number of results in google).
Hmm. I'm now craving a Gummy Bear on a Stick! =)
A very informative article )
But I guess you turned a very difficult task of finding suitable e-commerce platform into an impossible one.)))
Except all features that a business owner needs (design, shipping and payment methods, setting up currencies, security, friendly to user, easy to manage (a very often request) and lots of other things) now a business owner will think about SEO. I would say: poor businesses! Well, it was my first emotion.
Second is - you're definitely right. Considering that business is always a competition there's no another way. anything that doesn't evolve - dies.
Got to say the one thing missing (and I tweeted this earlier) is analytics - whilst it seems like it is quite simple, I think that decent integration at a fundamental level would result in a good implementation, something many major ecommerce sites lack (my previous role was working at Razorfish on analytics). One downside to using parameters as you have said is that you can't see usage on the site (without a bit of tweeking) ...
Another thing that I think would be cool would be rich media, including video etc.. it is amazing how much traffic product videos can bring to an ecommerce site!
Great post! From the SEO side… yes its obviously up to the person to choose the e commerce platform keeping his budget and his priorities in mind but come on let’s face it… Search engine Optimization is important and specially after the search engines that includes shopping search engines the idea of online shopping is becoming common and people are adopting it day by day…
By reading this it seems like all at one place is either impossible or very expensive but I must say there are some parts that one ecommerce site should have or else they will lose the search engine traffic and sales through search engine that are:
Ø Page level Control of head and Meta Content: This is important as without this there will be two common problems 1) without this it’s very difficult to appear in the search engine from the desired keywords and 2) Even if you are appearing in search from the desired term then improper Meta description will more likely not attract the user to click on the link.
Ø 301 Redirects and proper 404’s: Sounds normal but when it comes to ecommerce there are many platforms which do not give the independence to put 301 redirections or 404’s to non existing pages… usually website through the visitor to the home page that ends up as bad user experience.
Ø Site Speed: Google and even other search engines are counting as a ranking signal but it’s equally important to user too. Come on… Visitor/Buyer on your website has got choices if you are slow he will leave you and move to your competitors website and that is the only reason why I suggest not to use flash on your website.
I think which choosing an E-commerce platform do consider the fact that it’s for visitors and Search engines and then set your budget and priorities.
Its help the SEO manage expectations and feed backs for the given information.
Looks like https://www.shoppingcartelite.com has everything
About the images > different URL's (which is basically the same problem as using choice lists which trigger different URL's, also used by a lot of e-Commerce solutions):
Is this really a problem if u have a choice list written in javascript and 0 links to the URL's where any entry of the choice list is filled in? There is simply no way for Google to index this page, is there?
Of course, all assuming that other sites are not linking to the URL's generated by the choicelists (only to the 'standard' URL's).
Fantastic post! I think ecommerce systems are certainly overlooked these days and many people let these things slide as their ecommerce system simply can't do what they need it to do.
I've been using Magento for the last couple of years and find it to be a pretty solid system. For the most part with some changes it's got a very good set up. Control of URLs, redirection, customer reviews, product filtering, Google API integration, and a list probably longer than your post :)
The only two downsides are the complexity of the system (in terms of the code) and sometimes if it's on a poor server, the loading time. Other than that though the backend system is great and the product works fantastic. So perhaps not a system for those starting out who have no technical knowledge of websites but definitely for those who are willing to spend some money to see great results down the line.
Of course, if you are willing to spend and know a good developer then building your own custom system is a must. Ecommerce systems are great but you're always limited by what the developer thought was the best at the time unless you are willing to go into the code and start hacking it.
For those interested you can check out Magento here and a live working version on my clocks site.
I agree. Each item on the above list is available in Magento, which (as do so many others) has a good community behind it.
I use Shopify for a few stores and I really enjoy the flexibility of the system for small to medium size ecommerce. However, you can only export your data into a csv. Also, there is no way to create custom titles and descriptions in a products admin. That really pains me.
Maybe some of these ecomm platforms need some folks with ecomm SEO experience giving some feature consultation.
GREAT POST! IM new at the ecomm business but i have been a lot of personal development and research. your post has reassured me that im headed in the right direction. Thanks Glenn Byrd
Going social is the trend, adding videos is 1 thing but I started to see some other solutions including facebook stores into their platform (ex: https://www.solidshops.com/blog/releases/deployment-day-version-1-3-0-is-now-live/) not sure if facebook leaves this untouched though.
Twitterstreams is another thing but can't find an example.
As products are removed from acatalog, I should send a proper 404 status message.The screenshot in the article demonstrates a "404" page that is seen just like any other resolving URL by the search engines.
But how a proper "404" page should look like? Please show me the best examples?
Thanks.
The question is resolved.
We've had varying degrees of luck with various open-source ecommerce systems, Magento being the fallback, but I think if we took on a large ecommerce project with heavy duty SEO needs I would at least try to build it from scratch with CakePHP.
Microformats are the light and cheap way to achieve advantages over your competitors when selling products online. For example, we (3dwebdesign.org) are developer and have developed many plugins and addons for rich snippets for most ecommerce cms. But standarts for Microformats are not yet full completed and are changed often. In this way is not light to have many websites in serp with active rich snippets in google - sometimes snippets are shown, sometimes not and human action from google moderator is required.
Great tips. Ecommerce is very delicate and one must do it right if you are going engage in ecommerce
Great post, although I second @sgpratley on the colour issue.
Personally we find there is nothing as reliable and flexible as building your own platform, and we're still developing ours. Anything out of the box will always have a downside, and its usually that subtle nuance which the client demands will set his shop aside from the rest.
And the client MUST have what they want...
Great post! Let's not forget rich transactional emails (including abandoned shopping cart recovery emails) and personalization. These two can add incremental revenue to your store.
Plus you would also need a good promotions engine that allows you to test and optimize offers.
Having an integrated Order and Inventory Management System and CRM will ensure operational efficiency. You need to also ensure that you have a good shipping solution that lets you rate compare etc.
At GoECart, we've just launched the first fully integrated SaaS Ecommerce Suite (Ecommerce + Advanced Order & Warehouse Management + CRM).
[link removed]
I agree with your points but I don't know why I have this fantasy about videos.
In the past projects I have added all the stuff mentioned above along with the videos and my clients were making me Christmas dinner in the middle of April. It was brilliant.
Google is looking to go more social so I would definitely recommend adding videos of your products only if possible. Just check few cars sites :)
Automated recommendations for product-to-product and category-to-category links (or features with links) that are rendered in HTML for a search engine crawler to see. It's an oft-overlooked need and one that's very hard to do well at scale by hand.
We have been using Volusion for a few years now. It does not do everything but we are very happy with it and likely to stay. One thing that I do like is there is a great community of helpful users and developers. Our site is shirtsthatgo(dot)com if any one is interested in taking a peek. As always there is lots of work for us to do still with SEO, CRO, etc but I am enjoying the process.
Great post Mike.
I also think, ecommerce platforms should have ability to add text content for category and subcategory pages, as I have seen for some platforms, it is just impossible to add any text on these pages, which makes SEO difficult.
It should also have the ability to add Google analytics codes and Googel adwords conversion tracking codes on relevant pages relatively easily.
It's also important to have a good linking structure on e-commerce sites. You want to make it easy for a user to find what they are looking for. If it gets too complicated or convulted to hunt down a specific product, they'll just find somewhere else to make the purchase.
At least twice a month someone asks me what ecommerce software they should use. I hesitate to recommend a specific platform because of the numbers of variables involved including the needs of the customer.
Now I have a great post to refer all questions to! Thanks for making my life easier Mike.
Great post it goes to show, if you take that little extra care in the beginning when setting up your e-commerce site, all the steps there after are simplified, and made easier. Its about getting the foundation right in choosing the right e-commerce platform, so that if you need to make any changes in the future it can be done with ease.
Anyone know the best way to switch or upgrade shopping carts? I am using an old version of Zen-Cart and I know I have to change but I am looking for the best way to switch over and keep all my URL's I have seen the software cart2cart that is supposed to migrate your cart automatically. I haven't talked to anyone that has used it. I have built up 5 years of links etc. and don't want to lose anything to change shopping carts.
I've had experience with cart2cart, migrated my website to Magento, btw. There are actually not so many options for performing migration, and this one seems pretty ok.
As for the article, awesome! made me reconsider a lot of points. I'd also add analytics to those must-have features. And it seems Magento or some custom solution are the only options if you want to have most of the enlisted things. Other shopping cart developers might need to consider these things.
Thanks a lot!
Great post, Mike. You've inspired me to update the eCommerce section of my SEO report card doc!
If someone were to write an entire post about using Ajax to make eComm filtering not suck, I would certainly read the heck out of that ;-)
Some of our clients at Distilled have been fortunate enough to receive a comprehensive plan for AJAX filtering that doesn't suck and doesn't hide good organic landing pages :).
Maybe only a matter of time before I take that blog post on.
I recommend using Magento Commerce if you want something free (community edition). Check out the features. I use it all the time. If you really want to get good functionality on your site, this is the way to go. You can have multistores, multi languages, multiple currencies, SEO, shipping modules, checkout for Paypal & authorize.net & whatever merchant account you want. The list goes on and on. If you are selling product and want to take you site to the next level, I would use this platform. Vizio uses magento. The way you can tell is the shopping cart at the end during checkout. By the way, there are other versions of magento which include support (Enterprise and Professional edition).
Also for the people above, I am not in anyway mocking you:
Wordpress - Does not specialize in eCommerce. While it's has ecommerce plugins, you will be limited to Wordpress' funtionality.
ZenCart - I don't think very many people use ZenCart anymore. Also, there is a way to hack into the ZenCart shopping cart.
OScommerce - I heard good reviews about it, but I think many people are sterring away from OScommerce and going magento.
ASPdotnetstorefront - This one is bad ass! But it ASPX so you need to buy this. It's NOT open source. If you run into problems, at least there is someone you can call to troubleshoot unlike open source. (however, magento offers support for it's open source Enterprise and Professional Editions). HIGHLY recommended for ASPX SQL.
In conclusion I recommend, Magento Commerce for open source (php) & aspdotnetstorefront for sql aspx
Send me a personal message through SEOmoz if you need me to recommend a company.
Really informativ post, I remeber the times when I entered SEO one of my intial project was working on Semi ecommerce website & there are time its gets really tough optimizing such sites, but Mike has really explained nicely how some simple steps could make great difference.
I've found Business Catalyst to be a great platform in terms of SEO features and customisation... depends how it's built though. The sites we've built in-house have been great, but some externally built sites have been at the other end of the scale producing duplication errors and spread over ten's of different templates.
I still don't think there is any real SEO e-Commerce platform that offers the basics out of the box, let alone the above.
Fantastic article. I was just discussing some of these features here at work a couple of hours ago.
The company I worked for last spring used a horrible shopping cart system that was not very seo friendly.
Product reviews, ratings, everything all went to a new page with a plain text link. The navigationwas not very user friendly and there was no good way to handle redirects on the site. We had a lot of sites with dupe content for products with multiple categories and etc.
It was a huge mess pretty much. I am actually forwarding this article to them here in a few.
Nice post, always great to have someone else's tick-list to compare and contrast! Would agree with @RyanOD's, @moosahemani and @Yoast's points though.
I'd probably have a serious look at Magneto - has anyone any serious experience of using one of the WordPress ecommerce plugins/themes - would imagine scalability could be a major issue here but for a smaller inventory is it worth giving a go?
Great Post. As an ecommerce developer I have always tried to ensure that our ecommerce platform MantisShop is as search engine friendly as possible.
After reading this post, it was great to see that all the recommendations you put forward we have already implemented in our ecommerce solution. We have also found that this stuff works great.. we recently launched a website for a toy company and without even manually submitting the site to search engines or doing any manual SEO we noticed within about 2 weeks they started getting great rankings on their product and category names simply due to the fact that we have an automated XML sitemap, automated title and meta description tags for all pages, url rewriting and unique descriptive image file names.
SEO is such an important element of websites these days and by building in as much SEO functionality as we can into our website packages, we have been able to significantly help our clients attract relevant traffic when they launch rather that doing SEO as an 'afterthought' which many companies seem to do.
Dave Mason - Mantis Technologies
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I think bigcommerce has a lot of these features doesnt it? I've heard that for the price, big commerce is pretty legit.
BigCommerce doesn't have URL re-write capabailities.