What are your best tips for SEO on a shopping cart?
-
So, I am working on a shopping cart platform (X-Cart) and so far don't like it. Also, the web designer is not someone I've worked with before and he is understandably conservative about access--which limits what I can and cannot do from the back end.
One of the things I like to do is include text for the search engines. However, based on conversion, etc., I think the product images on a landing page (main brand info with specific products that show up) should show up first to move toward conversion first.
I am thinking of adding the text below the product images on the brand pages so the viewer sees the products first while still keeping the content seo. My practice is to use between 300-350 words minimum on a page.
Just wondering what best practices you have for a shopping cart. Care to share?
Any tips or hints? Thoughts on what I might do that would be most effective?
As always, thanks in advance for your sage advice!
-
Thanks Ian...I'll take a look. Nothing I can do but depending what I see I can add it to the "to do" list.
-
Thanks Ian...I'll take a look. Nothing I can do but depending what I see I can add it to the "to do" list.
-
What he is saying (I think) is that sessions can generate a limitless number of urls related to shopping carts. If you use get form actions for a shopping cart the entire form info shows up in the url and can be interpreted by a search spider as a unique site link leading to thousands of products being added to shopping carts by spiders. This isn't anything you can fix but you can test by adding an item to a shopping cart and seeing if you get a url that basically says "viewcart" or one that says "addtocart&item=234235"
-
I'm not sure what you are discussing Highland. It would be great if you could clarify what SEO technique you are talking about.
-
Hi Aron,
Yes, I write original content and am focusing on unique information that has not been given. The big problem on this site is that there is little information, if any.
I think the idea of rating and commenting on products is a great idea for user generated content. Since I cannot do much from my end based on the limited access, I'll suggest it to the client.
He does have social media accounts set up with a couple of icons on the site but I think creating more interactions would be a great idea.
-
One thing we do is we don't give you a session on your first hit. Since your cart is tied to your session, going to the cart without one just generates a "Your cart is empty" page. If you're a customer you'd need at least 2 hits to get to the cart and once you have a session it lasts 30 days. This cuts down a ton on bot problems with the cart. Yes, this is a technical thing (and probably not something your developer can do) but I've always found it useful.
Also, I once made a newbie mistake of making an item that could be added to the cart via a GET. Don't do it! Adding to the cart should always be a POST.
-
My best tip for shopping sites is to ensure your content is unique and well written giving as much genuineinformation on the product as possible. I always like to include bullet points to highlight features too.
Allowing customers to rate and comment on products is a great way to build up some awesome UGC on product pages.
Both of these options will help SEO and potentially help conversion too.
Including social sharing buttons for people to FB Like/Tweet Products cant hurt either.
-
Thanks EGOL, yes I agree. One of the main problems of this site is the lack of optimized links to the categories and to the products. Your point about related links is a great one. If you like this product you will like this...but using the names is a good strategy.
-
One of the most overlooked concerns is the navigation links that will drive power and anchor text into the product pages.
These could be from category pages, related product pages, article pages, homepage, blog pages, sitemap and more.
If you want your product pages to be vigorous in the index you need to drive some linkjuice into them. In addition, on-site text links can work magic for your rankings.
Related links on product pages can also lead to increased sales and larger shopping carts.
-
Hi Stephan...no worries, I am just working on the brand and product pages but thanks for sharing your concerns.
-
Thanks again Ryan. No, the developer will not give admin privileges which is a pain but I do have URL, title, description, meta control and sent over canonical, 404 page instructions, htaccess edits, and a few other requests which he did and then billed the client for.
He actually billed the client for adding me to a non-admin access (which I did not need).
Most of the web designers I work with let me in to do my thing so this is a bit difficult and annoying. LOL I can't get to the images but do have access to some of the alt.
Big issue is that it is costing my client unexpected expenditures but we are doing are best to work around it.
I am heading to the X-Cart forums in the am for some other ideas and appreciate your consistent input--most valuable.
-
If you are talking about the shopping cart itself, after folks put stuff in it: I would make that a noindex. I get paranoid about security and privacy so I would keep anything that is personalized in any way out of the search index. You don't want a link to a shopping cart with specific shopper id to get into Google. Even if the shopper id doesn't tie back to any personal data, you could have multiple people with the same cart id.
Anyway... I would suggest making the cart a noindex... I'm paranoid about it so I'd play it safe.
-
The best practices for a shopping cart would be the same as any other web page. Each cart software offers varying abilities to natively conform to SEO best practices. Many popular carts offer extensions to bridge the gap between the software design and the changes necessary for improved SEO performance.
If I were in your situation I would request control over the URL, page title, header, text, alt text, etc. All the normal SEO factors. If the web developer is not willing to provide you access, then ask the developer to make the changes. Either the developer will likely not be happy with making so many changes and then grant you permission, or the site owner wont like paying a developer to make text changes and he will request for you to be given access. Either way, the result is the needed changes are made.
My best suggestion would be to inquire on the X-Cart software forums as to what SEO extensions and customizations are available.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Big SEO Changes
Firstly, this is quite extensive so thank you to anyone who answers some or all of the below! So this is quite a lengthy ordeal, and I'm going to start by saying that I'm no SEO expert (yet). I've paid for SEO for years and only on the odd occasion has it made any real difference. It has come to the point now where I've spent so much money on SEO over the years with practically no benefit that I can't afford to do it anymore, so I am teaching myself. So, back in July my website was hacked for a total sum of three weeks. My SEO/Hosting company at the time didn't do anything about it, let the hack sit there and didn't even take the site offline. It just so happened that at the time I was changing over to a new site at the time anyway, so I launched the new site (completely different in structure to the old one), did all of the relevant 301 redirects, and my traffic hasn't recovered since. I have gone from around 100-150 daily visits to 0-10. The descriptions, keywords, alt image tags, h1 & 2, meta data, etc. is all much better (a lot of it was empty on the previous site) on the new site than it was on the previous site so I was assuming it would be better, but it isn't. Anyone got any suggestions as to why this might be? Here are some specific questions: Canonical Problem? My site is ecommerce and lists some products in several categories, that has resulted in a high duplicate content rate. Is it expected/accepted by google that this would be the case for an ecommerce website or do I need to sort out some serious canonical urls to fix the issue? The site structure of my website could also be a problem, but I'm not qualified enough to know for sure. If you view a product/sub-category, then remove the category section of that link, the product will still appear. I don't know if this structure is good or not? i.e. if you click both links below, the link will appear all the same. http://thespacecollective.com/space-clothing/nasa-and-space-t-shirts http://thespacecollective.com/nasa-and-space-t-shirts Is this a problem for SEO? Duplicate Product Tag Problem? I have many duplicate product tags appearing on many products, should these be blocked in the robots.txt? i.e. http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/space-flown/apollo-11-flown-cm-meteorite-acrylic http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/space-flown/apollo-11-flown Site Code Structure When choosing the template I would use for my website I did not stop to consider if the code was SEO friendly, this on my part was due to my ignorance on the subject. Is the site structure SEO-friendly or is it hindering my efforts? Website: http://thespacecollective.com Again, thank you to anyone who takes the time to read/care about the issues facing a newbie. My only option now is to learn SEO myself (which is well overdue), so any advice/answers are appreciated!
Technical SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Unique shop
Hello I have several websites www.example1c.om and www.example2.com and I would like to create e unique shop page where all the users that want to buy would be redirected, something like shop.example.com. Now, each website has its own catalog section but with this new system, if a user clicks on buy he will be redirected to shop.example.com like this: www.example1c.om/catalog click on BUY and redirected to shop.example.com www.example2c.om/catalog click on BUY and redirected to shop.example.com shop.example.com will be on a different server than the other 2 websites. Is it ok if I do a 301 from 1 server to the other server or I can be penalized? thank you
Technical SEO | | andromedical0 -
Transfer of website to maintain SEO
I am nearly finished building a new wordpress website to replace the old static HTML site which is currently doing very well in SERPs. My old site is currently hosted by a company who owns the site, my domain is registered with a different company and I have the nameservers pointed at Cloudflare. I have built my new site and have it hosted with a different company and I wish to keep the domain name registered with the company it is currently with.Is there an order that I should follow to move from the old site to the new site using my current domain name so that I minimize any impact on SEO. I built the new site with the same URL structure to maintain linking benefit. thanks
Technical SEO | | casper4340 -
Does adding Tool Tips to a site hurt it's SEO?
I'm wanting to add tool tips to my site as it's intended for non-technical people that are wanting high tech equipment and services. I thought that by adding tool tips, I could clear any confusion they may have about a particular word right there rather then them having to search for what it means. I did some research online and saw that it may hurt SEO ratings but wanted to verify here first before deciding.
Technical SEO | | sDevik0 -
Can anyone recommend an SEO friendly Joomla extension to use for SEO on an existing website?
Can anyone recommend an SEO friendly Joomla extension to use for SEO on an existing website? I have downloaded sh404sef but I don't want to change my URL's and make them longer than they are at the moment. Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | Karen_Dauncey0 -
Best Way To Handle Expired Content
Hi, I have a client's site that posts job openings. There is a main list of available jobs and each job has an individual page linked to from that main list. However, at some point the job is no longer available. Currently, the job page goes away and returns a status 404 after the job is no longer available. The good thing is that the job pages get links coming into the site. The bad thing is that as soon as the job is no longer available, those links point to a 404 page. Ouch. Currently Google Webmaster Tools shows 100+ 404 job URLs that have links (maybe 1-3 external links per). The question is what to do with the job page instead of returning a 404. For business purposes, the client cannot display the content after the job is no longer available. To avoid duplicate content issues, the old job page should have some kind of unique content saying the job is longer available. Any thoughts on what to do with those old job pages? Or would you argue that it is appropriate to return 404 header plus error page since this job is truly no longer a valid page on the site? Thanks for any insights you can offer.
Technical SEO | | Matthew_Edgar
Matthew1 -
Javascript bad for SEO?
If we utilize javascript to pull information from a database to display on a site, is that bad for SEO? Can search engines still see the data?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Local SEO Optimization
hi, Looks for advices,tips, links ressource to improve local seo optimisation in google places for domain "google. fr" as website business is in France ! Tks a lot in advance..
Technical SEO | | mozllo0