By: Arthur Cooper
Submitted: 2011-03-03 18:46:43 | Word Count: 664
What does that mean? It means that your shopping cart could be optimized for user experience to help you make the most conversions and cement your reputation with users—which will increase your ranking on search engine results pages as well.
Most businesses looking for shopping cart solutions are most concerned with the back end functions that will give them the most functionality in terms of inventory management, shipment options and payment options. Indeed, these three simple parts of the whole are the most important for both the ecommerce vendor and the customer, but each of them relate to these three functions differently and require different features from them.
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From the e-business’ point of view, getting your website and shopping cart to function the way you want it to, requires highly specialized programming and design knowledge. This is so that you can keep track of what is being sold, auto print shipping labels, have up to date estimates on shipping from different shipping companies, have the ability to record tax information, track inventory, ship from multiple warehouses, accept all major forms of payment, store customer data, perform financial online banking transactions, enjoy a high level of security and much more besides.
Purchasing a product online however only requires that the process be fast, accurate and easy to understand. Thus users and e-commerce businesses have quite different expectations from an online shopping cart feature. In terms of SEO rankings, you want to make sure that all the content in your shopping cart, such meta tags and product descriptions are search engine friendly. For example, don’t use ambiguous terms in your meta tags. If a user is looking for a quilt online, don’t use bedding or home decor in the page title because that could imply sheets, pillows, comforters, shams, or even lamps to the search engine. What you are looking for is for someone typing in ‘blue quilt’ to see your page in the top result listings. By optimizing your meta tags and page content, you will be telling the search engines as well as the users that your page is highly relevant to that user’s search. The same goes for descriptive ad-copy.
Always use the product name in the URL for the most SEO bang for your buck. Make sure your product names and the associated URLs are short and readable at first glance; 3 to 5 words at most. Don’t use stop words in the names either because they are distracting and only elongate the URL, causing search engine algorithms to gloss over them.
Make your product titles and URLs as unique and particular as possible. In other words, don’t import feeds unless you rewrite them, and don’t copy/paste product info. Always use an HTML products-only sitemap to make your items easy to identify and locate. In addition, don’t serve a 404 when something is out of stock because that is a missed opportunity for getting a visitor to your site. Keep the product up with a textual notification that it is out of stock. This keeps it accessible by search engines and will hopefully lead a user to stumble on your site. Even if they don’t purchase anything else, at least they know where they can come back and check for the item. A properly optimized e-commerce site will allow them to sign up for a reminder email notifying them when the product is back in stock.
If you think if the end user first, the customer, then it becomes clearer why your shopping cart needs to be search engine optimized in order to increase visibility and sales. Contact us today to see how you can begin implement this crucial step.
