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Search Engine Friendly Shopping Cart Software
By: Andrey Milyan, Sat Oct 15th, 2005
Web stores are usually much harder to optimize then regular
websites. The main reason for that is that most websites are
custom while web stores use ready script. That's because web
store script, let's call it shopping cart software from now on,
has to be much more functional then regular website and the
administrator should have full control over the store. Due to
that fact, most shopping carts on the market today use dynamic
URLs which are practically impossible for search engine spider
to crawl correctly. These scripts often use single meta data for
all of their pages and each page has very little or even no text
at all. This kills almost all chances of ranking high in the
search engines. So which shopping cart software is search engine
friendly? We will take a look at two shopping carts that are in
our opinion much more search engine friendly then the rest in
the market.
X-Cart
X-cart is very good shopping cart software. It is easy enough
for beginners and flexible enough for web developers. It has
most of the features you will need and it is easy to customize
because it uses templates. These features all pretty much
standard on all major shopping carts however X-cart is much more
search engine friendly. It let's use assign separate meta data
for each category (although not perfect, it is better then the
same meta tags for all pages of the site). Software also let's
you generate a static product catalog. This catalog is in HTML
with static URLs and is 100% crawlable by all spiders, including
GoogleBot and MSNBot. Cost: $185.
Pros: Easy to install and customize. Relatively inexpensive.
Cons: Limited optimization possibilities. More Info at
www.x-cart.com
Prospect Path Ecommerce System
This is much less known shopping cart software but after
checking out its features, we strongly recommend it to anyone
who is serious about search engine optimization. It seems that
this system was build with one thing in mind, search engines. It
generates static pages automatically; that means that all pages
in your web store are HTML with static URLs. System will also
put the name of the product into the title, keywords,
description, alt tags, heading, body text and even file name of
that product's page! All of this is done automatically as soon
as administrator adds a new product. Prospect Path Ecommerce
System also includes traffic statistic and ROI tracking. It can
track buyers from affiliate programs, text links, banners and
even magazines and newspapers (it employs promotion codes to
tracks buyers from magazines and newspapers). This shopping cart
is very easy to use but there is no installation wizard at this
time. After the purchase ABC4PC.com (creators of Prospect Path
Ecommerce System) will install and configure it on your server
for free. Cost of this shopping cart software depends on the
number of features you want but the starting price is around
$4,700.
Pros: Amazingly search engine friendly. Great tracking features.
Cons: Difficult to install. Expensive. More Info at
www.abc4pc.com
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