Hundreds and hundreds of search engine related newsletters wing their way into my inbox weekly. Maybe not quite that many but every ecommerce web site owner should subscribe to even more. The latest one I read about SEO for ecommerce sites was from Site Reference. It’s not hugely technical and most things they say are things we know but well worth to always keep at the front of your mind.
So they say that the five sins ecommerce site owners commit are: 1) they haven’t got enough content on the pages that don’t display products. So the home page and the category pages. Work on that, dear people!
2) They say that lots of ecommerce sites have bad URLs. The chances are that you have taken out our SEO-friendly URLs and are safe here.
3) Good meta descriptions – you can either choose to get the system to fill these automatically for you or you can get a system that allows you to edit every meta tag for every site. Site Reference say these are useful but not essential. We think so, too, so we leave this optional for you.
4) No alt tags on the images (alt stands for alternative text, for those who cannot see the image, which includes search engines of course). You are safe here where product images are concerned because the OsCommerce system we use does this for you.
5) the last issue they mention I cannot even pronounce; canonicalisation. If you go with a web site from us, your site will not have multiple URLs; in order to show a product in several categories, you don’t need to multiply it, just link to it from the various categories, and we explain how to do this.
So as far as these people are concerned, your site is okay if built with our version of OsCommerce.