Ecommerce Search Engine Optimization

Get to the top of the rankings with the most search engine friendly ecommerce software available

Natural search engine traffic generates over twice the click-throughs of paid search and accounts for the vast majority of new customers any ecommerce store earns. Beat your competition to these valuable eyes with a combination of powerful out-of-the-box SEO and full control over all aspects of your ecommerce SEO strategies. Elastic Path Commerce has been carefully engineered to enable marketers to achieve maximum search engine exposure no matter how they approach SEO.

Introduction

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) maximizes natural search rankings by providing search engines such as Google with all the information they seek in the most effective way. Elastic Path Commerce provides the best possible SEO whether you choose to hand-tune your SEO or not.

First, Elastic Path Commerce provides a number of features such as automatic creation of optimized page titles based on product descriptions; clean, keyword-rich URLs; and automatic generation of an SEO-friendly site map to help search engines find your pages. These features provide a great head-start and deliver powerful SEO right out of the box.

Even with these features, there's simply no substitute for hand-tuning by an SEO expert. Unfortunately, most ecommerce platforms present obstacles that interfere with SEO. In fact, according to a 2007 Marketing Sherpa study, "nearly two out of three marketers acknowledge encountering at least (emphasis on 'at least') one [site technology] obstacle that prevents SEO recommendations." Obviously those marketers aren't using Elastic Path Commerce because it's designed specifically to eliminate these obstacles, enabling full exploitation of SEO techniques.

Search Engine Optimized Faceted Navigation

Elastic Path Commerce is the first major ecommerce platform vendor to offer filtered navigation with full search engine optimization. This allows a site to automatically optimize for hundreds of thousands of keyword combinations (talk about capturing the Long Tail) without ANY additional personnel or outside consultants.

Search Engine Friendly URLs (including multi-language)

URLs of major ecommerce platforms are often terrible for SEO, containing stopper characters such as ampersands (&), question marks (?) and session IDs, all of which can force search engine spiders to stop crawling a site. Elastic Path Commerce eliminates these roadblocks to high rankings with clean, spider- friendly and keyword- rich URLs, even if you sell in multiple languages.

Page Titles

One of the most important aspects of search engine optimization for ecommerce sites is the page title. A title essentially tells a search engine what the page is about, so having pertinent keywords and calls to action here is essential. Elastic Path Commerce generates optimized titles automatically based on category and product data but also gives search engine marketers complete override control over the contents of title tags.

Meta Descriptions

Descriptions are critical to an effective search engine entry. If the description contains the keywords being searched on, this content is displayed in the search engine listing, hopefully leading to a click. Elastic Path Commerce delivers complete control over the contents of meta- descriptions for every page on an ecommerce site.

Meta Keywords

Though not as important as in the late 90's, meta keywords still have some weight in determining what the contents of a page are about on some niche search engines. Elastic Path Commerce lets site optimizers have individual control over the contents of this tag for the site, category and product pages.

Tableless Layout using Pure CSS

Sometimes considered the secret sauce to effective search engine optimization, a CSS- based layout allows you to position your main content as close to the top of the page code as possible without forcing any visual compromises . This allows a better content to code ratio versus table- based layouts. All else being equal, a CSS- based layout should ALWAYS outrank a table based layout . The Elastic Path sample store comes with pure CSS- based templates.

Automated Breadcrumb Navigation

Breadcrumbs not only help customers find what they want, they also help search engine spiders find content much faster.

Heading tags

These tags are typically the focal point of a page, right after the main product image. The H1 tag carries a heavy weight in most search engine algorithms so Elastic Path Commerce gives complete control over the contents of this and other heading tags.

Automated SEO Friendly Site Map Generation

Site maps help search engine spiders find content on your site much quicker and easier. The faster spiders find your pages, the faster they can begin to rank.

Additional Info on Search Engine Optimization for Ecommerce

All search engine friendly ecommerce software features are automatically generated, but also offer the ability to be manually overridden for more granular search engine optimization. SEO for ecommerce sites often incorporates many strategies; Elastic Path Commerce has the utmost flexibility in order to accomplish any ecommerce SEO tactic desired.