Cyber Monday and Search Engine Optimization for

Shopping Carts

Today is Cyber Monday, which means the shopping frenzy continues on the internet of many office computers. According to the National Retail Federation, 11 million more people are expected to shop online this year than last, bringing the total number of online customers to 100 million. When it comes to online shopping, search engines are the most important source of information. So, what features should a shopping cart system have in order to promote a merchant’s products across the web’s search engines?

(1)Customized Page Titles – A common mistake ecommerce sites make is starting product page titles with the site name. It is better to put the key words most relevant to the page first. Some carts offer a feature known as the “automatic URL rewriting.”  What this does is change long webpage addresses into keyword-filled search-engine-friendly addresses to boost your product pages in the rankings

 (2)Customized Meta Descriptions – Customized meta descriptions are the descriptive paragraph found below the page title in search engine results. Meta description is the an online merchants chance to advertise in the natural search engine listings.

(3)Customized Photo Tags – Having images with text descriptions provides merchant with many benefits because it encourage Google to index your images and make your page more relevant for the key-word term

(4)URL Redirection and Rewriting – Many carts are now making it easy to alter product page URLs, without affecting existing page rankings.  Furthermore, links should all start with http:// or www and end either with or without a slash,” All links need to be consistently in that form. That makes the most sense for the search engine.

(5)Automatic Keyword Writing – Many carts now offer automatic keyword writing.

(6)Fast, Friendly Design – Offering CSS formatting where coding is kept to a minimum through ASP.NET, where any JavaScript is condensed and where large header blocks are eliminated.

(7)eBridge Web Store Integration Solution – With an increase in sales volumes it will become paramount for online merchants to implement a web store Integration Solution.  eBridge’s web store Integration will assist web stores with the high volume of demand by eliminating manual data entry and accompanying errors, improving information flow, increasing efficiency, and achieving savings in time and money.  Click here to see all 37 supported accounting systems/ERP packages that eBridge integrates with. 

Reference:

Meacham, Jennifer.(2008). Shopping Carts and Search Engines. Retrieved November 30, 2009, from http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/761-Shopping-Carts-And-Search-Engines

Article by Dave Malda

Dave is the Sales Manager and Marketing Coordinator at eBridge.

Integration, Webstore Integration, eBRIDGE Blog Cyber Monday, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, web store integration, Webstore Integration