In this article, we take a look at 5 absolute essentials for an SEO-friendly shopping cart. Before taking the time to develop a website in an inferior shopping cart solution, you should carefully review the following 5 tips.

Choosing the Right Shopping Cart for Search Engine Optimization

Choosing the right E-Commerce platform is an important decision. You want a platform that is easy to use, scalable, consistent, and feature-rich. You also want to make sure your E-Commerce platform is search engine friendly. Many E-Commerce websites are almost totally dependent on organic search results as a source of profitable traffic.

Your choice of shopping cart will certainly have an impact on your SEO efforts. There are so many different platforms that it is impossible to say which one is the best. However, here are five tips for what you want to be able to control with your shopping cart solution.

1.) Ability to create unique page titles (title tags) and metadescriptions.

The title tag is likely the most important on-page factor affecting optimization, and if you can't edit that on each product and category page, you are severely limiting your ability to optimize your website.

Metadescriptions can be important because you can put text in there that will encourage searchers to click through to your website when they see the results in the search engines. Although unique metadescriptions probably have no impact on your actual ranking, they may have a big impact on your click-through rate on the search engine results page and therefore a big impact on your bottom line.

2.) Ability to edit the alt tags of product images.

For some product searches, images may appear near the top of the search results. Moreover, many users search in Google Images directly, and you want to make sure your image is showing up for the product near the top of the results. By far the most important attribute to get you rankings in image search is the alt text. Make sure your platform allows you to edit and optimize this important text.

3.) Ability to create SEO-friendly URLS:

Bad: yoursite.com/filename.php?id=F98ZF4&productId=39222 Good: yoursite.com/products/large-picture-frame

4.) FTP Access

I would also want to make sure that you will have FTP access to the shopping cart for the most control and flexibility. Without this, you are basically stuck with whatever features or structure the shopping cart has natively.

5.) Extensible Platform

It's usually a wise idea to pick a shopping cart solution that has many features and lots of extensions. Pick one with a big developer community that has produced quality add-ons and plugins, and this might be very helpful down the road. For example, you may want to add a robust product review system. This will be very helpful for SEO as you could get unique content from user-submitted reviews. If your shopping cart solution has a weak solution or no solution at all for this feature, you may be kicking yourself down the road.

Choose a powerful shopping cart with a robust developer community and you'll likely be happy with your shopping cart system for years to come.

Conclusion

There are many factors to consider when picking the right shopping cart platform for your business, but you will certainly want to keep SEO considerations in mind. The worst thing you can do is dive head-first into developing a weak shopping cart and needing to start again from scratch later. Do your research ahead of time and save your business big money - and save yourself many headaches.