7 replies to this topic

[fdstd]

Hello

My name is Dan and I'm new to this forum. I want to open an online store this year , most probably in February - March 2007 and I have a few questions before I do that since I never administrated one before. My store profile will be: tobacco & accessories sales and I need an , I don't really know how to name it, the best "seo friendly" shopping cart script. The only script that I know is osCommerce but I've looked over hotscripts dot com for others and I liked following ones : cs-cart , squirrelcart, sunshop, digishop, viart, in-commerce and avactis. Their demos looked great from my side of view but here comes the real issue: which one is the best "seo friendly" one ?

I'm worried about this since the region were I live now doesn't have such websites and I really need to attract some potential customers from web searches, the shopping cart script + an adwords campaign should return good results in a couple of months. I don't mind if I have to pay for the script or if I have to use a free one. I can handle the administration part (I saw the most scripts have almost the same admin panel and they are very easy to configure).

Please take 1 minute and post your opinion about the best "seo friendly" one. The security must be good too, I won't process credit cards (yet) but in the future it might be a possibility to do that, but I want the script to have at least medium grade of security against mysql attacks and other vulnerabilities.

Sorry for my poor english, it's not my native language.

I'm waiting for your thoughts about this.

Best regards and a Happy New Year

[redsonia!]

Welcome to the forum, Dan!

I use and really like securenetshop at www.securenetshop.com. My designer/seo company also started using this cart on the sites they develop after they saw it on my site, so it must be pretty seo friendly. It is easily customizable. I don't know how to code, but I was able to install it by myself on my site. They have an inventory control and a number of shipping options that are not available on many other carts.

And they have a number of reasonably priced payment plans.

(I don't make any money or anything by recommending them. I'm just very happy with their product.)

[fdstd]

their demo isn't so good looking or maybe it hasn't been updated for a long time...

[Randy]

Welcome fdstd !

You'll want to check out this thread from awhile back and also some of the other threads in this area.

Most carts these days are reasonably SE Friendly out of the box. Or can be made SE Friendly pretty easily with some add-in modules they'll offer.

[fdstd]

ok one more question before I dig: static url's help alot to seo ? should I seek for a cart with this feature ?

[chrishirst]

static url's help alot to seo ?

Nope.

should I seek for a cart with this feature ?

If it's there use it, it's not don't worry too much about it

[Randy]

By "static" I'm going to assume you're asking about static-looking URLs. Sometimes called SE Friendly URLs.

If that's the question, it makes no difference. The engines spider dynamic addresses just fine as long as you're a little bit careful. Which is something most of the carts have covered these days. Here are the things to watch out for in the Static vs. Dynamic debate.

Static/SE Friendly

• If you go this route realize that you're probably going to be putting more stress and strain on your server. More stress because normally the cart is really going to be Dynamic in nature, but will use Apache's mod_rewrite module to make the URLs appear to be static. So make sure your server will be able to handle the extra stress and strain. Especially if you run a fairly busy site.
• If the cart actually writes/saves static files to the server --rather than faking Static URLs via mod_rewrite-- the above potential problem will not be an issue. The only time you would be putting any extra strain on the server is the short time you're generating new pages.
• No matter which of the above you use you'll want to exclude the spiders from your dynamic pages. Make sure they can only see the static URLs.

Dynamic

The list of things that can cause problems is pretty short, and again have been dealt with already in most major shopping cart applications these days.

• Make sure no pages you want to be indexed require either a Cookie to be set or a Session ID to appear in the address. The spiders don't do cookies and the engines don't like SIDs.
• Try to limit the number of variables to three or fewer.
• Make sure each page can only be accessed via one URL address and not 2 or 3 or 10.

So in the end Static vs. Dynamic makes no difference. But you'll need to make sure you've covered a few bases no matter which you choose.

[nomind]

depending on when you are planning to launch check out Sunshop by Turnkeywebtools(dot)com. Im using their old script which isnt the most SEO friendly (due to duplicate/supplemental results in Google) but their 4.0 to be released any day looks VERY promising.