shopping cart SEO

[rich5705]

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I've been told I should definitely make sure I have an SEO friendly shopping cart for my site. Could anyone give me some tips on how to make a shopping cart as SEO friendly as possible?

[djbarker]

hiya, Rich, 9 times out of 10 you wouldn't want an seo friendly shopping cart - as you wouldn't want a visitor to go from a search engine direct to your shopping cart page!

any more info on why they suggested this?

[rich5705]

Hi dj, I guess this sums it up best

"If you are using a shopping cart system, make sure it is search engine friendly and configured to pull the item titles and put them in your title tags and descriptions are pulled to be placed in your Meta Tags."

I wasn't sure either as I would have thought you'd want the product pages to be SEO friendly rather than the cart.

[djbarker]

I agree with you.

This would basically have your product page competing against your cart page. Your product page is (hopefully!) more likely to convert a visitor than your shopping cart, so concentrate on optimising your product page instead.

I usually exclude carts from search engines with robots.txt - most retailers seem to do the same.

[Brendon]

I'm somewhat confused here - I gather there is a perceieved difference between a "cart page" and a "product page".

Surely the whole point of an SEO-friendly cart is to bring visitors to the site as close to the point of purchase as possible? So, searches for a product name / number should land on that product page, more general searches should return the category pages etc

Am I missing something about what a "cart page" is?

[getvisible]

yep, as Brendan says there's a difference.

I optimise product pages for relevant keywords. But then make sure that Google doesn't get upset with duplication caused by various iterations of the product being crawled.

For example, a client had drop downs to choose size and colour. Google was crawling them and because their system wouldn't allow you to change the tags they appeared to be duplicates.

Also their "add to cart" button did the same sort of stuff.

I just nofollowed and robots.txt'd out the offending stuff and kept page rank going through to their "similar products" pages instead of duplicates of the same pages.

So keeping the crawlers out of the functional buying pages will help retain the page rank within the productive pages of the site.

Its a misnomer that you want Google to crawl and index EVERY page on your site, focus their attention on the stuff that drives sales.