Recommend ecommerce solution for highest SE rankings

[ukgeezer]

A couple of years ago we wanted to produce an ecommerce site that would allow us to sell IT Products in the UK market. With research we found that at the time, none of the high ranking sites were dynamic and none could rival a well optimised html site. The best cart solution at the time appeared to be Actinic.
The research was ignored and we eventually opted for a site using Zen Cart.
This has never achieved great ranking results and does not compare with the success of the html site we operate and we are therefore forced to rely on Froogle/Adword generated traffic.
We are now looking to start again. The research shows the market is dominated by Price Comparison sites and the odd html site.
Have forum members carried out any research showing preferred site languages asp/php/asp.net, off the shelf cart/custom cart packages?
Does anybody know if there is an industry standard used by the Price Comparison sites?
I welcome feedback
Regards

[greeneagle]

Welcome to WPW ukgeezer!

I moved your post over here because I believe it will get more attention with the e-commerce specialists in this forum.

Ken

[sub_kovert]

Hi ukgeezer

Google state themselves that the server side scripting language used plays no part in the ranking of the site, so use ASP, PHP - whatever. A problem IS caused when the dynamic url generated contains more than 2 or 3 parameters (eg '?')

Quite a few carts will now generate 'static' HTML pages for you via the control panel.

I have had good results for the carts I have implemented for clients. I use a cart called Cactushop (www.cactushop.com) -Version 6 has just been released and this is fully XHTML & CSS. The 'PRO' version they sell will also generate 'search engine friendly' urls if it is still of concern for you. In my opinion this is not as important as it used to be. Make sure you page content and titles are as good as they can be.

[Kinley]

If you run your own web server (or a virtual server), you can use an apache module that changes the URLs to be more SEO relevant.

I don't remeber the name of this module... anyone?

[jester]

I would suggest looking into using an ecommerce solution company that is dedicated to such problems like the guys who make ecommerce solutions at www.vectorcraft.com, they did an ecommerce site (www.bath-accessory-store.com) for a friend of a friend of mine and they are very happy with results and levels of optimisation available.

[Paul B]

As sub_kovert pointed out it is the session id numbers (SIDs) of many carts that are added to the URLs spidered that are the problem.

osCommerce and its deritives have various 'search engine friendly URLs' options. Like identifying googlebot and serving it pages without SIDs.

There are additional add-ons, eg, that add the product name om a a product page in the <h1> tag to the page <title> tag. Did you use these on Zen Cart?

[Sarah]

Hi,

A simple answer to all your queries.......

A site can be ranked high provided it is build by keeping in mind the visitors point of view and have very good presentation and content inside it.

Other than this we need to balance the things from search engines point of view. Following point may help you...

1. Build a site in any language and to promote the dynamic sites there are techniques known as advanced SEO which cannot stop you from ranking high

2. Try to build quality links to rank well

3. develop and place good content to your site enriched with both the generic and specific keywords.

Start working and take 100% assurance to rank well.

Sarah
sarah006@gmail.com

[ukgeezer]

Thank you for all the replies and apologies for the delay in responding.
Re:sub_kovert
I am very interested in the cactushop solution and will take this further by downloading the software and I have your contact details.
Re:Paul B
The main problem we have, is that the original website used a doctored Version 1.2.4 of Zen Cart and this is now upto Version 1.3.?
We are now trying to convert to the later version.
We know how to make the url more search engine friendly with the htaccess file?
But we still are having problems with the Meta Tag module and some other issues.

Thanks to all the other respondants, I will keep you informed of the decisions we make and future progress.

[Steven1976a]

Sarah said "techniques known as advanced SEO which cannot stop you from ranking high"

Hi Sarah, what do you mean when you say advanced SEO and do you have any papers/threads sites etc... where i can find out more as we are currently just developing a new site in asp language

thanks
steve

[M.G.]

Originally Posted by sub_kovert

I have had good results for the carts I have implemented for clients. I use a cart called Cactushop (ASP Shopping Cart Software for Ecommerce - Standards compliant, SEO, UK VAT and US State Tax support) -Version 6 has just been released and this is fully XHTML & CSS. The 'PRO' version they sell will also generate 'search engine friendly' urls if it is still of concern for you. In my opinion this is not as important as it used to be. Make sure you page content and titles are as good as they can be.

I have come across a problem with Cactus Shop which we've been trying to solve. Even where the URL rewriting is enabled, when you add deep links into a shop from the home page or top categories for "Related Products" or "best sellers" or whatever, you get the dynamic URLs. This means that multiple pages are being generated for the same content, and I have noticed that in many instances a page is being indexed twice under a different URL.

My concern is twofold:
1) That we're losing the benefit of having the deep links because they are pointing at different URLs
2) Search Engines are finding what looks like many duplicate pages across the site. I'd be unconcerned with 3 or 4 duplicate pages but in one instance it's duplicating URLs for nearly every product on a site three different ways.

Has anybody found a way to resolve this? It seems highly impractical to have to alter the robots.txt file every time a product gets added.

[cw1865]

I think the problem here is that the systems (and I have worked with two of them, volusion and americommerce) are generating the name of the page and then are creating aliases.)

[Dubbya]

You may need to rework the scripts (include files) which dynamically create the page title, meta description and keywords portions of the category and product display page so that they're pulling the most relevant product-specific information from your database.

Typically, most carts don't do a very good job of this because they use the same include files to build every page in a site. I've been meddling with these issues for a while and have made some significant progress but it takes a lot of time and patience to get it just right.

I've implemented separate include files to build category pages, product lists and product detail pages. Additionally, most of my content pages are hard coded so that I am able to put in and tweak whatever I want to without affecting any other pages.

[vwebworld]

The newer version of zen Cart does a better job with SEO. Plus, you can specify metas for each product if you want or let the program determine the meta.
To have friendly url's you do need to implement the seo module.

~Roland

[P3Hosting]

Hello,

I am looking for a shopping cart solution for a small (around 100 item) store, that ranks well. I am currently looking at Zen-Cart, OS-Commerce, and Cube Cart. Any other suggestions that I should look at, and any pit falls to watch out for?

Thanks
George

[cw1865]

I sware by volusion.