SEO & eCommerce

External Since: Feb 22, 2005 Posts: 1

Hi all,

I am new to online business. My research while reading through some of
the valuable inputs from different users revealed that search engines
have an incredible role in online business.

Can somebody suggest me any shopping cart whose architecture truly
supports search engines indexing?

Regards,
Chris

External Since: Feb 23, 2005 Posts: 2

Chris,

Unless you are selling very, very niche services or products, SEO is
DOA. Google only lists 10 sites on their first page of search results
and very few people look beyond that page. You will continue to see the
industry move away from SEO and more twords getting the most bang for
the buck from paid advertising. It was a constant arms race that was
destined to fail anyhow: people figure ways to game the search engines,
and the search engines then plug those holes.

Now, on to your question... Smile

I would recommend that you look into
Google's "Froogle" program. It's been a while since I looked at it, but
I was one of the first developers to utilize it's interface. Basically
the ecommerce app takes a snap-shot of the product information and
automatically FTPs that file to Google every night. Google then
indexes it and places it in their search results. I've since left the
company that I was working with at that time, but we were getting
pretty impressive results even as new as the program was.

The Froogle wasn't part of the shopping cart app per-say, because it
ran batches in the background by querying the product database
directly. I had custom built both the shopping cart and the Froogle
part, so I don't really know if there is a product that does intergrate
them now. But because of independence of the two, you might not even
need it.

Hope that helps,

- Jamie
// Founder, SmallBizGeeks.com //
"A community of small-business technology entrepreneurs"