Shopping carts are an essential part of an e-commerce site. But the way that many shopping carts are designed can be very detrimental to search engine rankings. That’s because expertise with search engines is not one of the skills possessed by many designers and developers. A designer’s job is to create an inviting, user-friendly site. A developer adds the database and interactive capabilities. Working with search engines is a separate art and science. The following are features that are important if you wish to see your product pages have a reasonable chance of ranking well with search engines.

Shopping Cart Features that are important to search engines

• Use of standard hyperlinks to your products and information pages. Search engine spiders cannot make choices, enter product numbers, select an item from a drop down list, or follow elaborate JavaScript menus. As a general rule, they can only follow hyperlinks. Make sure that the menu and linking structure consists of hyperlinks. They can use either text or images, but need to be hyperlinks. Text hyperlinks are prefereable to image hyperlinks because the text in a hyperlink reinforces the theme of the receiving page.
• The ability to customize the HTML title tag and the Description Meta tag on each page. The HTML title tag is the first place a search engine looks for keywords, and this text displays as the title for your page on all search engine results pages. The Description Meta tag displays a description for the page in most search engine results pages. The Description Meta tag will not help with search engine rankings, but it is a powerful marketing tool to entice a use to click on your link on a search engine results page. A generic title and description used universally throughout a site will not entice users to click on your links, nor will it identify the keyword theme for a Web page.
• The ability to add 250 to 600 words of unique text to product pages. Search engines crave content, and if your product descriptions do not contain content, they will never rank well. The most important part is that the pages must contain unique content. This means that you will have to write content for each product. If you copy the content from another site–evan the product manufacturer’s site–the page may never rank well if duplicate content penalties are applied. Take an example from Amazon.com. That site ranks well due to the large amount of focused content on every page.
• A limited number of name-value parameters in the URL. Many shopping carts use an excessive number of name-value pairs in the URL. The name-value pairs are the codes that display after the question mark (?) in the URL. Name value pairs are used to pull specific data from a database. Most search engines can read up to two or three name-value pairs. Some shopping carts will use five or more name-value pairs, which can create problems for search engine spiders. Search engine friendly URLs do not use name-value pairs in the URL. They present a URL that looks something like:

  
  http://www.mydomain.com/1234/
  

  This is then translated on the server using a URL rewrite tool into a URL that the server can understand, such as

  
  http://www.mydomain.com?id=1234
  

  When done properly, the URL rewriting happens on the server. The only URLs the spiders and your users will see are the search engine friendly URLs.

• The ability to NOT use a session variable in the URL. A session variable is a randomly generated alpha-numeric identifier that uniquely identifies a user. If a user cannot be uniquely identified, there is no way to associate a user with items in a shopping cart. Normally, a session variable is managed through cookies. If cookies are turned off in the user’s browser,
  many e-commerce sites will not function properly. Search engine spiders do not use cookies, so the result is the same as if cookies were turned off in a browser. Many shopping carts add the session variable to the URL if it cannot be stored in a cookie. A session variable in a URL looks something like this:

  
  http://www.mydomain.com?PHPSESSID=aeeF39bBba66329e10g2a3e6gd7sSD3A
  

  A session ID becomes part of the URL, which could result in a duplicate page penalty because each time a search engine spider returns, it would see a different URL for the same page because a spider would be assigned a differnt session ID each time it visits the page. Some shopping carts can detect search engine spiders and will turn off the session variable. A session variable is not important to a spider because a spider cannot add items to a shopping cart in a properly designed e-commerce site.

If you are interested in optimizing the product pages, make sure that the product pages reside on your Web site under your domain name. Some shopping cart solutions will manage the product pages on the shopping cart provider’s site and not on your Web site. You will only be able to optimize pages that use your domain name.

Avoid using a shopping cart solution that wraps pages in an HTML frameset to make it look like the products are on your Web site, when in reality the product pages, shopping cart, and possibly the entire Web site actually reside on the provider’s site.

There are modules available for many shopping carts, such as osCommerce and others, that will add the features you need to make your e-commerce site search engine friendly. If one of your goals is to have an e-commerce site that ranks well, the features listed above should be added to your list of requirements.