Benefits Of SEO For Ecommerce

The purpose of any business website is to promote a product or service
online. The purpose of an ecommerce website is to take it one step further
and to allow your visitors to purchase your products or services directly
from your website. The ecommerce website has many great advantages over the
non-ecommerce website in that it allows for the generation of revenue with
little-or-no time spent in selling past the cost to have the website
designed and maintained, and it does not require the visitor to call you
during business hours thus helping secure the sale to an impulse buyer. If
your website provides all the information that the buyer would want, you can
save significant money in sales time spent in that the visitor can find all
the information they need to decide to buy from you without taking up your
time or that of one of your sales staff. But ecommerce sites have a serious
drawback as well, very few of them can be properly indexed by search engine
spiders and thus will fail to rank highly.

A non-ecommerce website may have the disadvantage on not being able to take
the visitor's money the second they want to spend it, however if it can be
found on the first page of the search engines while your beautifully
designed ecommerce site sits on page eight, the advantage is theirs. The
vast majority of visitors will never get to see your site, let alone buy
from you, whereas a non-ecommerce site may lose sales because they don't
sell online but at least they're able to deliver their message to an
audience to begin with. So what can be done? The key is in the shopping cart
you select.

The biggest problem with many SEO-friendly ecommerce solutions is that they
are created after the initial product. Shopping cart systems such as Miva
Merchant and OS Commerce are not designed with the primary goal of creating
pages that will be well-received by the search engine spiders. Most shopping
cart systems out there today are not in-and-of-themselves even spiderable
and require 3rd party add-ons to facilitate even the lowest form of
SEO-friendliness. The money you may have saved in choosing an inexpensive
shopping cart may very well end up costing you your business in the long
run, especially if you are using your shopping cart as the entire site.

There are essentially two solutions to this problem. The first is to create
a front-end site separate from the shopping cart.
What this will effectively do is create a number of pages that can be easily
spidered. The drawback to this course of action is that your website will
forever be limited to the size of the front-end site. The second option is
to choose a search engine friendly shopping cart system.

Finding an SEO-friendly shopping cart system is far easier said than done.
There are many factors that have to be taken into account including the
spiderability of the pages themselves, the customization capacity of the
individual pages, the ease of adding products and changing the pages down
the road, etc.

BizAtomic's E3 Ecommerce website is a feature-rich, secure ecommerce
solution which allows you to easily sell your products online. E3 Ecommerce
is a complete solution offering:
integration with comparison shopping portals, Search Engine Friendly urls,
powerful marketing & reporting tools, built-in content management and an
easy to use administrative interface.

BizAtomic's E3 Ecommerce Version 5 just launched, features
include:

* Updated Search Engine Friendly (SEF) Urls
* Newest Products (with RSS feed)
* Recently Viewed Products
* Per product META description and META keywords
* Major improvements in content management

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