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Shopping Carts and SEO
Shopping and the Web. They go together like Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Well, maybe not quite, but Internet shopping is one of the fastest-growing industries in the world. It's fairly easy to set up shop and sell almost anything from bananas to banana boats on the Internet. Browse through the shopping section of Google (Froogle) or Yahoo and you can see the amazing variety of products that are available. Click on a few of those links and take a look at the address bar on your browser. Many online stores use some kind of dynamic system for generating their pages. This means their product information is drawn from a database and dynamically displayed. Dynamically displayed pages look something like this: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=shopping+cart&btnG=Search You will notice that there is no extension which would indicate a static page. Is there a problem with dynamic pages? From SEO perspective there is a real problem. Search engines have trouble indexing dynamic pages, especially with multiple variables. Here is what Google has to say about dynamic pages: "If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few". Shopping carts that use a lot of parameters will have trouble getting indexed by search engines. The Solution? A client recently approached me to provide a shopping cart that would allow his products to be indexed properly. In addition, he had special requirements for the size and the cost of the shopping cart. The cart needed to be as inexpensive and as small as possible. My client had previously been using PayPal "Buy it Now" buttons but disliked the way the customer was immediately taken to the PayPal site. He felt that would discourage people from making additional purchases before checking out. I investigated the various free shopping carts like Zen Cart, osCommerce, and AgoraCart. They all offered some sort of SEO modifications, but they were too large to fit in my client's limited hosting account. Digging a little further, I came across Commerce.cgi -- a compact, fully customizable shopping cart. But free version did not offer the features that my client desired. The pages are dynamically generated, and there is no support for PayPal. However, for a $50 lifetime membership, he had access to the member's area which provided extra scripts for PayPal integration. There is also a very interesting script for making dynamic pages appear static. This script, called Search Engine Advanced, uses the Apache mod_rewrite function to change requested URLs. I checked with my client to see if his Apache server supported mod_rewrite, and that was in luck. All systems go! Installing the Commerce.cgi script was quite straightforward, and I could easily adapt the templates to match the style of my client's existing web site. Once the cart was installed and running, I tried adding the Search Engine Advanced hack. There were a few complications, but the support staff at Commerce.cgi helped me sort it all out. The results are very pleasing indeed. All the dynamic pages appear as static, and Google, Yahoo and MSN have started to index the site. You can see the site up and running at Tea From Taiwan - specializing in hand processed oolong tea. I would highly recommend Commerce.cgi for anyone looking for a highly configurable shopping cart. It is suitable for small to medium sites and offers great support through their BBS. Copyright 2005 by Ross MacIver This article may be redistributed freely on the Internet or in ezines as long as the resource box and hyperlinks remain intact. Ross MacIver is the director of Best Online Content. We provide quality content for your web site and offer a full range of design and SEO services.
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How You Can Easily Compile A Gigantic Keyword List It doesn't matter what kind of marketing you are involved in.Having the most keywords for your market or niche is a surefire way to win over your competition, and that's a fact!The most important place to have thousands of keywords is in your pay-per-click campaigns, as you want to hit as broad an audience as possible, within your market or niche. Google Website and Web Page Indexing for Dummies You may have heard how important it is to have your website optimized for search engines, especially Google, which is currently the most popular worldwide. The reason for this is so your website will be ranked high in the search engines and people will see your site first, click on it, and increase your traffic and ultimately your sales. Twelve Steps to Higher Search Engine Placement Recent studies suggest that more than 80% of new visitors to any web site get there as a result of a search engine query. If this study is to believed, it certainly suggests that working to get high rankings in the search engines might be the most effective thing you can do to bring traffic to your site. Meta Tag Tactics - Give Your Website Traffic a Boost with the Meta Tag Basics Getting your site noticed by the search engines and rewarded with top rankings is most webmasters main goal, however there are a lot of different factors that play into what the search engines are looking for, including Meta tags. So, if you don't know anything about meta tags but are interested in learning about them so you can use them to possibly increase your rankings, then read the following basic tips regarding meta tags. Search Engine FAQ Why shouldn't I use a submission service that submits my site to 5000+ search engines?Some Company's claim that they submit your website to 5000+ search engines. The majority of these 5000+ so called search engines are free links for all pages, very special interest web pages or, even worse, websites masquerading as search engines. Building Link Popularity As Easy As 123 The most difficult area of SEO is building link popularity. You may be thinking why? Because there are no easy ways to build link popularity. Search Engine Visibility - The Mantra of Corporate Profitability The corporate fundamentals are par excellence! The product is unsurpassable and the website is a web designer's dream in creativity and design - but there is a vacuum - of potential online customers! - The website lacks the basic ingredient of success - Search Engine Visibility! - which is what search engine optimization is all about.Increasing the search engine visibility is vital to any online business. Would You Like More PageRank? The higher the PR of your site the higher will be its search engine position. So the goal is to get lots of sites linking to your site. The Power of Search Engine Friendly URLs I recently invested quite some time into generating search engine friendly URLs for several of my websites to increase my ranking and to have more pages indexed. I can highly recommend to look into this if your own website does not have se-friendly URLs. Search Engine Spiders Lost Without Guidance - Post This Sign! The robots.txt file is an exclusion standard required by allweb crawlers/robots to tell them what files and directoriesthat you want them to stay OUT of on your site. Search Engine Monopoly Ever wondered how one search engine is dominating the entire web. In any business, you have so much stiff competition. Google is Quickly Changing... Google is quickly changing.. Why Search Engine Marketing Has A Passion for Web Site Usability Watching a recent football game, I imagined two very different teams: one called ??The Horders?? and the other, ??The Hunters??. In the game, it takes planning and skill to carry a football a few yards. Search Engines: Different Types, Different Strategies There are four basic types of Search Engines:Free Search EnginesPay-For-Inclusion Search EnginesPay-Per-Click (PPC) Search EnginesDirectoriesBecause each type does things a little differently, you need to adapt your strategy to take advantage of their differences.Free Search EnginesYou can submit your pages to these engines free, but be careful. The Life Blood of Internet-Based Home Businesses...Search Engines Anyone involved in an Internet-based home business will soon cometo recognize the importance of search engines as a vehicle toattract potential customers.Since the inception of Google in 1998, the popularity of using search engines has increased dramatically. Search Engine Keywords - What Do People Search For? Do you ever wonder how people search for things on the Internet? What if you knew exactly what words they typed when using a search engine? If you're marketing a product or service it's extremely insightful to know what are the most popular search terms relating to whatever you're marketing.The Overture CompanyOverture. Google Gunning For Directories? Why is it that webmasters are so quick to blame Google if their website falls down the search rankings, or out of the rankings altogether? Can it never be their own fault?I read an amusing forum post headed "What's up with Google?". The writer had a website just 2 months old, which had only had 2 visits from Googlebot, a Google robot. How To Get Number 1 Spot In Google, Every Time, Guaranteed Woaah! Wait a minute. Before I exclusively reveal these insider secrets can I ask you question? Well, actually, I want to ask you a series of questions. Submitting Your Site To The Open Web Directory: Some Dos And Don'ts One of the most important steps in any site's publicity campaign is the submission to the Open Web Directory (http://www.dmoz. How To Get Number 1 Spot In Google, Every Time, Guaranteed Woaah! Wait a minute. Before I exclusively reveal these insider secrets can I ask you question? Well, actually, I want to ask you a series of questions.
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