Getting your products and services found online is vital to building traffic and sales. There are many things to consider when you are looking to build the web traffic to your site and numerous internet resources to help you.
In terms of your eCommerce solution though there are some fundemantal requirements that need to be in place to ensure your produts and service can be found by the search-engines.
Search-Friendly
Some older eCommerce solutions have not kept track with changes in search-engine protocols. Often these solutions still use frames in their web pages or frame-forwarding (one URL that masks the real web page address of each page). These technologies hide your individual product pages from the search-engines.
Always check that a solution generates Search-friendly URLs within the catalogue, Search-friendly web pages that allow entry of title tags (some solutions can even generate these for you) and Search-friendly navigation. More and more solutions are getting this right but some still seem to be living in the dark ages.
Dynamic Pages
Some solutions create the shop pages 'on-the-fly' meaning that the content of the page is only created when a visitor clicks on the link. This may sound strange but as product details, promotions and stock levels change frequently some solutions choose to produce the product page directly from a database query so all this information is up-to-date. This means that there are no permanent product pages for the search-engines to spider.
If you have a lot of niche products or services with many product options (i.e. whisky, miniature, glenfiddich, scotch, special cask, single malt, presentation case, engraved) then these options will be an important part in getting your website well listed on the search-engines. If they are hidden from the search-engines you are not going to get any traffic from searches for any of the keywords. If you have 1000s of products with many variants and they are hidden you are loosing the single most important bit of search-optimisation on your site.
Double-check how your intended solution presents any dynamic pages.
Accessibility
There is a growing acceptance and legal motivation to ensure your site is accessible to all users. If it is important that users with different audio / visual needs can access your site, then there are solutions particularly designed to assist them. Try searching the web for the type of eCommerce solution you are after but add ‘accessibility’, ‘bobby approved’, or ‘webxact’ to your search to find relevant solutions. The ‘Bobby Approved’ scheme validates a website’s accessibility and ‘Webexact’ is an updated version of this scheme.
Although accessibility can seem like an additional burden it quite closely reflects the best practices behind good search-engine optimisation and it also demonstrates your commitment to ensuring the web is open and available to everyone.
