Optimising Your Shopping Cart

Nowadays you can buy all kinds of things over the internet, be it a birthday present for that special someone or the latest popular gadget, all from the comfort of your own home. As more and more people switch on to the possibilities and options available in online buying, so do the numbers and competition between sellers. Therefore getting your website well indexed and ranking highly in search engines has never been so important. Below are just a few of the optimisation tips we advise and can offer to help boost your search engine rankings and really get your online business thriving:

Search Engine Friendly URLS
Having URLs that contain the category or product name that particular page is being optimised for greatly helps the relevancy score given by search engines. Many shopping cart platforms tend to overlook this aspect and leave the url with all the dynamic variables included e.g. www.domain.com/product.php?cat=23&pid=7. Just looking at the url like that a person would have no idea what it’s pointing at, and some search engines might not even be able to follow a link with these kind of variables appended to the end (although this isn’t so much of a problem anymore).

Depending on the platform used, we can change the URLs so that they take on a much friendlier form, something along the lines of www.domain.com/categoryname/productname.html. This way users can see exactly what the page will be about before clicking on the link, and search engines can quickly categorise products and the overall structure of your shop.

Header Tag Controller
Often overlooked by many out-of-the-box e-commerce solutions, the extra information provided by dynamic title and meta tags can make the difference in ranking for long-tail product name searches. They allow you to label the title of individual product and category pages, as well as give a small summary and set of keywords for each page. Adding this functionality to your shop allows you to include variations of your keywords that will increase the chances of your page coming up on searches.

Breadcrumb Links
Another feature that allows for more effective structuring of a site’s structure in Google’s index, breadcrumb links are the links usually at the top of a page which act as a navigational aid to both customers and search engines. Acting as a sort of “You Are Here” marker, they show the trail that leads to the particular page being viewed. For example, if you were on a product page, the breadcrumb link trail might take the form “Home > Category > Subcategory > Product Name”. So with carefully chosen names for categories and product names, the relevancy of a particular page will shoot up with such a feature in place.

Dynamic Sitemaps
The sitemap provides an essential way of ensuring all of your site’s pages are known about by all the important search engines. An XML sitemap, while not immediately usable by human visitors to the site, follows strict guidelines that allow search engines to quickly index all URLs contained within them including information such as when the page was last edited. Creating an XML sitemap will help to ensure as many pages of your site being listed in search engines as possible.

These are just a few of the features we can provide when building you an e-commerce shop or optimising your existing solution. Be sure to contact Just Search for more details on what we can offer to help improve your online shop and really drive up your visibility, and ultimately, your sales figures.

Rik
SEO Programmer