SEO and Online Marketing - San Diego Style

I’m going be posting these from time to time as I see things in my day to day business.

One of the first things I’m going to write about is SEO Law #1 based on something I read today on a forum.

SEO LAW #1 - Never ever, ever use a 3rd Party Shopping Cart as the home page of your site if you can avoid it.

The reasons are this:

1) With 99.9 % of the Shopping cart code, you are stuck with whatever the cart software generates for HTML (or whatever spits out to your browser).

2) SEO options are limited if they exist at all.  More often than not, if SEO options exist for a 3rd Party Shopping cart they are designed to be a universal setting.

3) Shopping carts are written by coders/web designers.  This means that they they don’t take SEO into consideration when creating the shopping cart software.  It’s not the Coders or the Web Designers faults, their jobs are only to get a working product that is free of defects and bugs.  I’m not knocking them either, they do their jobs and the come up with great products.

4) If you make changes to the static SEO code/keywords on a shopping cart, again if it exists in the given cart software, the SEO changes will hurt your rankings.

5) The cart may spit out a beautiful site in your browser but 99% of the time the Cart web pages won’t ever be 100% valid HTML code.

What can we do about this?

Well we can do the following (off the top of my head):

1) We can create static HTML pages that lead into the cart software.  This can give you great SEO benefits.

2) If you do decide to stick with the 3rd party cart software as the front page we can use a blog!

3) We can dance if we want to. We can leave your friends behind. ‘Cause your friends don’t dance and if they don’t dance, Well they’re no friends of mine. I say, we can go where we want to, a place where they will never find, And we can act like we come from out of this world Leave the real one far behind. And we can dance.

4) We can take the source of the front page of the cart software, save it as a HTML file, clean the code up, fill it with SEO goodness, and then use that as your new front page.  Granted, this may not work with all Cart software but it’s worth a shot.

5) We can create a new domain and use it as our all-static HTML (php etc) main site and use the shopping cart as a separate site on a separate domain.  This way your primary domain will get all the love from the search engines and your customers will be happy buying your products.

6) In the Case of an ASP cart, we can create a static HTML Site map, with the proper keywords, for the site.  That will help the search engines find all the products on your ASP shopping cart.

Until next time!