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Monday, November 13, 2006

Benefits Of SEO For Ecommerce

The purpose of any business website is to promote a product or
service online. The purpose of an ecommerce website is to take
it one step further and to allow your visitors to purchase your
products or services directly from your website. The ecommerce
website has many great advantages over the non-ecommerce website
in that it allows for the generation of revenue with
little-or-no time spent in selling past the cost to have the
website designed and maintained, and it does not require the
visitor to call you during business hours thus helping secure
the sale to an impulse buyer. If your website provides all the
information that the buyer would want, you can save significant
money in sales time spent in that the visitor can find all the
information they need to decide to buy from you without taking
up your time or that of one of your sales staff. But ecommerce
sites have a serious drawback as well, very few of them can be
properly indexed by search engine spiders and thus will fail to
rank highly.

A non-ecommerce website may have the disadvantage on not being
able to take the visitor's money the second they want to spend
it, however if it can be found on the first page of the search
engines while your beautifully designed ecommerce site sits on
page eight, the advantage is theirs. The vast majority of
visitors will never get to see your site, let alone buy from
you, whereas a non-ecommerce site may lose sales because they
don't sell online but at least they're able to deliver their
message to an audience to begin with. So what can be done? The
key is in the shopping cart you select.

The biggest problem with many SEO-friendly ecommerce solutions
is that they are created after the initial product. Shopping
cart systems such as Miva Merchant and OS Commerce are not
designed with the primary goal of creating pages that will be
well-received by the search engine spiders. Most shopping cart
systems out there today are not in-and-of-themselves even
spiderable and require 3rd party add-ons to facilitate even the
lowest form of SEO-friendliness. The money you may have saved in
choosing an inexpensive shopping cart may very well end up
costing you your business in the long run, especially if you are
using your shopping cart as the entire site.

There are essentially two solutions to this problem. The first
is to create a front-end site separate from the shopping cart.
What this will effectively do is create a number of pages that
can be easily spidered. The drawback to this course of action is
that your website will forever be limited to the size of the
front-end site. The second option is to choose a search engine
friendly shopping cart system.

Finding an SEO-friendly shopping cart system is far easier said
than done. There are many factors that have to be taken into
account including the spiderability of the pages themselves, the
customization capacity of the individual pages, the ease of
adding products and changing the pages down the road, etc.

BizAtomic's E3 Ecommerce website is a feature-rich, secure
ecommerce solution which allows you to easily sell your products
online. E3 Ecommerce is a complete solution offering:
integration with comparison shopping portals, Search Engine
Friendly urls, powerful marketing & reporting tools, built-in
content management and an easy to use administrative interface.

BizAtomic's E3 Ecommerce Version 5 just launched, features
include:

* Updated Search Engine Friendly (SEF) Urls * Newest Products
(with RSS feed) * Recently Viewed Products * Per product META
description and META keywords * Major improvements in content
management

Author: BizAtomic

About the author:
http://wwww.bizatomic.com

              

posted by Jason M. Michaels at

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