Gerard, thanks for registering and commenting. Have to confess, though, that I haven’t taken this to the next step and done any serious investigation into which platforms could be recommended. I remember commenting on some other blog (maybe SEOmoz?) a couple months ago that the best piece of linkbait for someone to work on would be a detailed article about the most SEO-friendly CMSs and commerce platforms. Really wish someone would put that together…..

Miriam - I think your approach is the right way to go. The product/sales pages should be separate from the shopping cart, and they should be optimized. Those pages obviously need an ADD TO CART button, and when that’s clicked the customer “enters” the cart system, but they should be able to easily return to the store.

I don’t have any ideas on solutions, though. In my previous job, when I was doing some webdev and a little bit of programming, we had our own database language that was written in-house and it handled everything without a flaw, even big product databases in the 4- and 5-figures. I could optimize the product pages just fine, or we gave control to the client to write page titles, meta tags, etc. It was all very customizable. The drawback to this setup is that, because it was our own programming language, your site was not portable to another web host. Fortunately, few clients were ever inspired to leave … but the ones who did had to start almost from scratch with their new host/developer.

We’ve been struggling with one of these issues and I thought I’d mention it here as Gerard has asked a question above.

We use securenetshop’s cart because, rather than it dynamically generating the product pages, one builds the physical pages and then integrates them as the last step with the cart. This results in real, static, product pages that can be individually optmized and filled with good informational content and well as something to buy.

However, it’s this very aspect that makes the cart unsuitable for very large projects. It takes several months to build a 1000 product e-commerce site this way, and though I do believe the end result is ‘meatier’ than a site built with session ids, it’s really nitty gritty to do this, and there isnt a CMS associated with it that then easily lets the client go on to add their own products in future, unless they want to learn HTML and handcode like we do.

What are your thoughts on this. Hope this comment isn’t too long, but your post and this issue have brought this to the front of my mind, as we turn away work for clients who want to put up a 3000 product website. I don’t want my husband to keel over from manual data entry, so we have to say ‘no’ because we don’t have a good alternative method to the way we normally build for small businesses.

I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Miriam

No matter what size the retail operation, though, I keep noticing a similar group of problems. I thought I’d outline six Retail SEO problems, some of which are unique to the industry, and some which are not….