Shopping Cart SEO Tips
Any online store with a shopping cart should be aware that the architecture of the URL's can become very unfriendly to SEO and we should not forget that tehse types of pages are often as important as the main content pages that draw vistors in.
Let's evaluate what we are talking about here - typically a shopping cart URL will look something like:
http:// example. com/department-name/product-name/
What would be more favourable would be to get the product name much higher up the URL and possibly even drop the use of the department name - of a better way of writing teh URL so it is SEO fiendly is:
http:// example. com/product/product-name/
It is better to have a flatter URL structure with as little hierachy as possible, this obviously can cause problems if you run a business that has many products with an overlapping name. But the benefit is that you will get better indexing (as your site is less deep) the URL will stand more chance of being indexed and lastly - if you use a "department" name and then one day re-organise department names, you will automatically lose all SEO benefit gains by having the URL with the department name index. By keeping a more "direct" flat structure this is not going to happen, unless you start renaming your.
Keep things as simple for a search engine to understand as possible, especially in the URL.
- Keep as much extra data out of the URL, writing the extra info into a cookie if you absolutely need them and performing a 301 redirect.
- Keep URL’s short as possible by including only the keywords that are primary to the page.
- Give them the clues they are looking for about what information to attribute to the products through internal anchor text and links.
- Keep product titles and descriptions as unique as possible.
- Rewrite or add content if you need to make it unique.
- Only include department category pages if there is keyword value.
- Always use an HTML and XML sitemap to increase crawlability.
Contact us to see if we can help improve your shopping cart infrastructure.
