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.

Hi Joshua.

There is no concern at all with internal pages outranking your home page. It can be perfectly natural.

Let's say you have a site about...well, almost anything. Today you perform an interview with the President and talk about...well, almost anything. You publish that interview on your site. Overnight that interview will probably attract thousands of links causing that page to be the most linked page on your site. There is nothing wrong with that result.

You can try to sculpt your PR within your site a bit. You can say hey, I have a ton of PR on this one page and I want to move some of it to my latest or most profitable products. In that case, you can add a sidebar to the page with "latest products" or "featured products". You may also be able to sneak in a few anchor text links within the content itself depending on how the interview progressed.

A video which may help: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qigo05nAqKw

I agree with William and Malachi as well.

WordPress is the world's number one CMS. It is free, offers the most extensions and support, is easy to use and you are familiar with the software. If you ever need work done on your site, there are plenty of experienced developers who can help.

I have reviewed about a dozen CMS solutions and have never heard of Sitefinity. It may be a great solution but even if it was, your selection of themes, extensions, updates, etc. will never be close to what WP offers. If your current developer left you for whatever reason, your list of experienced developers who can work with you would be severely limited.

My solution would be stick with WP unless you are provided with an exceptionally compelling reason to move. If that is offered, also be sure to understand what WP offers that Sitefinity does not. The main reason I would use another CMS rather then WP is because WP is best for blogs and simple sites. If you require more features, my preference is for Joomla.