E-Commerce more emphasis on root domain and categories?

[William.Lau]

Hi all,

I'm still in my dilema after taking over this ecommerce site. Currently running Volusion(please for your own sake never use them, 7$ for each GB over), I plan on taking the site to a dedicated server running on Magento.

Should we worry too much since majority of our links are to the root domain while a small portion is to actual products? I think there should be more emphasis on the categories and root domain rather than actual product pages. I mean this is e-commerce and not a content site.

Thanks!

[EugeneF]

A couple comments:

On where to place you emphasis:  Both products, categories, and home page should be used for SEO.  You will capture the greatest number of long tail phrases this way.  Product pages will capture searchers with specific intent for individual products.  Category pages will capture searchers who have a more general intent.  Home pages can be leveraged for a few items or categories you want to spotlight. (Often used for new "featured" items).

Search term:  Basket ball shoe  - goes to category page

Search term: Nike 980 size 11  - goes to product page

On your Volusion / Magento issue:

Your Volusion issues with bandwidth can be solve with offsite hosting of images.  This will save you the bulk of your bandwidth problem.  (There are other issues with Volusion, but this one is easy to solve)

Magento seems to have speed issues when you scale up your web site to thousands of products and high order counts.  I have been looking at Megento, but do not use it.

[OCFurniture]

EugeneF,

You mention Volusion have other issues? Would you elaborate. Since we use Volusion for 3 of our sites

Regards

Tony

[EugeneF]

Volusion is based on programming that is over 10 years old.  It is difficult to customize as much of the programming is not touchable by the site owner.  They moved their hosting from Rackspace to their own servers.  Up time reliability is not what it needs to be.  They spend money marketing their product and not enough money on customer support.  Communication is not very open.  When a problem occurs, they blame it on third parties.

In short, they are riding on previous success and not making the needed customer requested improvements.

[OCFurniture]

Thank you

[William.Lau]

Yes very true. Volusion is just extremely limited, and even FTP access is not really FTP access. The software seems to be outdated compared to some other carts, and their "SEO" is just meta data.

Open source carts are probably the way to go but will cost more initially.