How to make SEO work for your ecommerce business

What do you think is the primary task of any business website Plainly, it is to promote online the product or service that you are offering. And when we talk about ecommerce website the objective goes one step further to allow the visitor to make a purchase for your product or service online directly from your website. This could boost your revenue generation with little efforts and time needed to make the sales figures rise. The cost of this type of selling is low as you need to spend on the maintenance of the website and a bit on the online promotion you need to carry out. There are a lot of impulse buyers on the net and they can be a great source of revenue for your business through your website. But for this you need to have all the required information available to the customer on your website itself, so that they can make an immediate purchase. This will help save on your time and the money you have to spend on the sales staff to convince people to buy from you.

Of late it has been discovered that most ecommerce website are not well indexed by the search engines. And thus they may not get enough business through this most effective and yet zero priced method of online promotion. Usually most ecommerce websites never feature on the first two pages of the search engine results, and featuring on any other page down the line does not get you any results. Most people who find new website through search engines will never know about your presence owing to the low search engine ranking that your site has. Being low in rank you may not get any visitors to your site through this mast effective way of generating traffic to your site. That leaves the ecommerce enabled websites with the question how to get indexed higher with search engines to get more visitors to their websites. So where does the exact problem lie

A major problem with most ecommerce sites equipped with SEO friendly solutions is that they are optimized around the initial product. The shopping carts being used like Miva Merchant and OS commerce are not designed to be very search engine friendly. The search engine spiders may never index them for they are not created in such fashion. Most of the present day shopping carts require third party add-ons to get them indexed by search engines. You may save some money by deciding on inexpensive shopping carts but this saving will not benefit you in the long run, especially if your entire site is based on the cart.

To beat this problem you have two options to follow. First thing to do is to create a front end site which is separate from the shopping cart. These pages being free from the shopping cart will be more easily indexed by the search engine spiders, provided you make them search engine optimized. This can get you indexed but remember that the indexing is only for the front end site. The second option, which is a better one, is to choose a shopping cart which is search engine friendly. But finding one of this type is no kids job. The features that one has to look for are search engine index-ability, customization possibilities for individual pages, ease of being able to change pages and add or remove products. Considering all this you may really have to do some hard work to find such a suitable shopping cart for your website. Such a cart is rare to find but you sure could find one with a little effort. Such a cart may be expensive at the very onset of it but it saves you some money as you need not build a front end site to get indexed. This would also mean saving on space required hosting the web site, and you could use this space to make some more relevant pages to increase the worth of your site and improve your search engine ranking. Such engines help you design highly customized pages which get indexed fast and you can even get the page rank for each of the pages.

The major benefit that accrues from this type of as hopping cart is the increase you will see in your sales figures. Search engines are known to send you much targeted visitors who stand a better chance of turning into actual buyers. The cart may cost you an extra of around a hundred dollars per month but the sales figures could shoot up by a few thousands.

Currently work is on in some areas to develop even better carts which would have new features like internet marketing and promotion tracking systems in-built, which will cut down on the work to be done by the ecommerce website owners.

Lastly to sum it all up, it would be much wiser for any ecommerce site to use an SEO friendly shopping cart and get increased business rather than use the free shopping carts and be deprived of a major source of buyers. If your site is well indexed by a search engine and your rank is high in the result pages, you will benefit from an increased targeted traffic to your website. It was always difficult for ecommerce sites to get indexed by search engine spiders, but with the latest versions of SEO friendly shopping carts this setback is easily overcome.