Search Engine Friendly Shopping Cart?

Shopping carts are notoriously un-SE friendly and will often need serious tweeking or an expert on .htaccess to get them friendly.

Are there any you know of out there that instantly create nice static html pages for products with no session id's?

Gringo.

Take a look at my Zoidiasoft Technologies site. It uses the RTCart shopping cart and my pages index just fine. For instance:

http://www.zodiac-x-files.com/delph...le-download.htm

Curt

Don't use a shopping cart in the dynamic set-up. Instead build HTML pages and place buy buttons on them. Be sure that the buy buttons process through a form instead of through an html page.

If you have an HTML page as the target of your buy or checkout buttons you will be blasting a ****load of pagerank where it will do you no good.

Gringo,

do you mean product catalog or shopping cart? product catalog should be SE-friendly. But shopping cart is just for users to check out. It is not required to be SE-friendly.

I am using dynamic shopping cart system and all of the pages index just fine. You can create static pages like was suggested also as part of this strategy.

Every single dynamic page on my cart system has been indexed just dandy. I am using Miva. See my sig if you want to explore.

Another shopping cart that generates a HTML catalog is X-Cart.

When I first started 5 years ago, I used to use my FileMaker database to generate the HTML pages automatically, then I would upload the HTML pages. It was a pain, but worked... until I had over 1300 products that needed constant updating.

The key is to find one that works for you that also generates an HTML version automatically within the software.

Why do you need to do that when google and yahoo index dynamic pages just fine? Why go through the extra of creating a real static html when its all the same to the SE's. Just curious.

Indeed, I meant product catalogue, linked to shopping cart. I've looked very briefly at oscommerce (open source solution), but haven't had time yet to check if it would fit in with the static html product catalogue concept.

Gringo.

I know a few people who use oscommerce and they seem to swear by it. If I were to do another shopping system I would investigate that option only because I believe it is totally free. I am a little skepticle on opensource commerce since I do not know if that can pose any security threats or not. I'm sure there are hackers releasing "free" mods that compromise your security. But then again, if you know php perhaps you can identify these problems.

I use osCommerce, mainly because it's free, and have to say I'm really happy with it. What I like about it, apart from being free, is the ability to modify the scripts to suit your needs, a lot of the free shopping carts are quite limited. There's also a large community which means there's always support available if you get stuck.

By the way, I have no problem getting all my product pages spidered and indexed. osCommerce has the function available to kill session ids if it detects a known bot, so google, yahoo, msn etc have no problems.

I used actinic, not cheap but quick and easy development.
You will need to optimize the code onece the store is developed.

It's true that Google and Yahoo can spider dynamic pages, there are other search engines that might not do as well as Google and Yahoo. If the shopping cart generates HTML pages, then you know 100% that all SE will be able to fully spider your site.

Another reason is because there seems to be some weight, or at least a little weight, with the filenames. So if you have generated HTML pages using your title or header as your filenames, you might get a little better results.

CubeCart is another great free shopping. Try that one for a shopping cart.

Agreed. Use static html pages and text relv. anchor links into your e-comm. I suggest to my clients right now- that it is easier, and more cost effective to catalog the first 2 tiers deep of their e-comm with static html pages linking into the process. Helps with the serps, and helps tracking conversion triggers IMHO better.

Dwight
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