The ideal SEO e-commerce site

[RikkiD22]

Hi All,

I am currently writing a spec for moving our current e-commerce website and it got me thinking from an SEO perspective.

We are all usually restrained by the current website set-up / CMS and there are things it can never do despite how hard we push for the changes. If you had the chance to start from a blank canvas (like I do currently) what would be on your wishlist?

[augustos]

Hello Man,

I already ask this a couple of weeks ago and some guys bring a cool tips about ecommerce SEO.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/seo-for-e-commerce

Hope it helps.

[RikkiD22]

Hi,

Thanks for pointing me to your thread. I will have a read now.

[RyanKent]

I read the other thread and am still wanting to know the community feeling on the best eCommerce platform. If you were to build a new site, what would you choose and why?

[RikkiD22]

We are speccing our new site based on Magento.

The main reason behind this is because we need full control but with the option of quickly bringing in external help for advanced developments.

Other than that I believe the SEO features are very strong and the results on sites built on it can be extremely good.

[mattbeswick]

Some of the most important things:

• Product Feeds: Most of our sales come from Google shopping - forget this at your peril.
• Search engine friendly URLs (i.e. /blue-widget/ or /categories/widgets/ instead of ?productid=5 or ?catid=10)
• Make sure your CMS works for you - it should help you match the URL, Title Tag, alt tags, H1 and body content with the product targeted on that specific page)
• Social Media integration (a service like addthis will make that easy to implement)
• Ensure that pages load as quickly as possible - use as few js libraries as possible, combined css, etc)
• Not related to your cart but... Use a blog to post good, interesting content and then market it to other blog owners.

I'm sure there're loads more but that's a starter

Matt

[RikkiD22]

Thanks Matt.

The URLs are a great example of something which is easy to do when switching to a new system so have the freedom to specific them but trying to change them on an existing site can sometimes prove a nightmare!

[mattbeswick]

Yeah, definitely.

Another thing related to this is canonical url implementation - ideally you want a CMS that automatically adds these and, even better, gives you control if and when needed (such as canonicalising to a 'view all products' page for a category).

-Matt

[firstconversion]

Magento is apparently very restrictive and pretty slow. OK if you want the out of the box functionality with a small catalogue, but tough if you want to do something different

Anyone else have a experience with Magento?

[RikkiD22]

I would be interested to hear peoples views on this also. We have a mid size product catalogue, about 5k products, which we are looking at transferring to Magento.

[RyanKent]

Stephen,

Can you offer recommendations on another solution?