Shopping
and the Web. They go together like Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Well, maybe
not quite, but Internet shopping is one of the fastest-growing
industries in the world.
It's
fairly easy to set up shop and sell almost anything from bananas
to banana boats on the Internet. Browse through the shopping section
of Google (Froogle)
or Yahoo and you can see the amazing variety of products that
are available.
Click
on a few of those links and take a look at the address bar on
your browser. Many online stores use some kind of dynamic system
for generating their pages. This means their product information
is drawn from a database and dynamically displayed.
Dynamically
displayed pages look something like this:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=shopping+cart&btnG=Search
You
will notice that there is no extension which would indicate a
static page.
Is
there a problem with dynamic pages? From SEO perspective there
is a real problem. Search engines have trouble indexing dynamic
pages, especially with multiple variables.
Here
is what Google has to say about dynamic pages:
"If
you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?"
character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls
dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters
short and the number of them few".
Shopping
carts that use a lot of parameters will have trouble getting indexed
by search engines.
The
Solution?
A
client recently approached me to provide a shopping cart that
would allow his products to be indexed properly. In addition,
he had special requirements for the size and the cost of the shopping
cart. The cart needed to be as inexpensive and as small as possible.
My
client had previously been using PayPal “Buy it Now” buttons but
disliked the way the customer was immediately taken to the PayPal
site. He felt that would discourage people from making additional
purchases before checking out.
I
investigated the various free shopping carts like Zen Cart, osCommerce,
and AgoraCart. They all offered some sort of SEO modifications,
but they were too large to fit in my client’s limited hosting
account.
Digging
a little further, I came across Commerce.cgi
-- a compact, fully customizable shopping cart. But free version
did not offer the features that my client desired. The pages are
dynamically generated, and there is no support for PayPal.
However,
for a $50 lifetime membership, he had access to the member’s area
which provided extra scripts for PayPal integration. There is
also a very interesting script for making dynamic pages appear
static.
This
script, called Search Engine Advanced, uses the Apache mod_rewrite
function to change requested URLs. I checked with my client to
see if his Apache server supported mod_rewrite, and that was in
luck. All systems go!
Installing
the Commerce.cgi script was quite straightforward, and I could
easily adapt the templates to match the style of my client's existing
web site. Once the cart was installed and running, I tried adding
the Search Engine Advanced hack. There were a few complications,
but the support staff at Commerce.cgi helped me sort it all out.
The
results are very pleasing indeed. All the dynamic pages appear
as static, and Google, Yahoo and MSN have started to index the
site.
You
can see the site up and running at Tea
From Taiwan - specializing in hand processed oolong tea.
I
would highly recommend Commerce.cgi for anyone looking for a highly
configurable shopping cart. It is suitable for small to medium
sites and offers great support through their BBS.
Copyright
2005 by Ross MacIver
This
article may be redistributed freely on the Internet or in ezines
as long as the resource box and hyperlinks remain intact.
Ross
MacIver is the director of Best
Online Content. We provide quality content for your web site
and offer a full range of design and SEO services.
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