SEO Essentials: the Proper Web Server and Platform - Proper E-commerce/Web Publishing Software Selection
(Page 4 of 4 )
Some E-commerce application software and web publishing software can make it difficult to implement onsite search engine optimization improvements. In short, there is some software that is not just good for SEO.
Basically, any commercial website needs two major web software platforms. One is for the shopping cart, so you can show products and let customers make purchases. The other is for blogging or other content, and usually involves using a CMS.
Selecting the proper shopping cart software/blogging/CMS platform can be tricky, but below I've included some helpful guidelines.
First, an ASP.NET platform, PHP-powered templates and other templates powered by other server-side scripting languages will do just fine for SEO -- but there are lots of developers and support for the PHP language. This means you can easily look for someone to help the onsite SEO if your website uses PHP-powered templates.
Second, note that some E-commerce/CMS templates are unique. For example, there are templates that are files that are generated locally (by a specific computer) and then uploaded to the web server.
A typical example is Actinic's shopping cart software. While this shopping cart is great, it can be a bit difficult to work with the files if you hire someone (in another location) to do SEO work for you. Some website owners in this situation may even give remote desktop access to the SEO firm to execute this job. Find some shopping cart software that can be easily edited and made to work without resorting to some complicated website and file access issues.
Third, some shopping cart/e-commerce templates rely heavily on JavaScript and flash. While this is becoming more common, trendy and more fashionable, it could cause some issues with your SEO. Search engine bots can run into problems crawling for website content if your site relies heavily on JavaScript, especially for navigation. You should make your website as crawlable to search engines as possible. To find out if your website is crawlable, try this test:
- Open the template in the browser (you could ask your developer to do this test).
- Turn off the browser's JavaScript feature. In Firefox, this can be turned off by going to Tools -> Options -> Content and unchecking “Enable JavaScript.”
- With JavaScript turned off, try reloading the page. Niow, starting from the home page, you should see hyperlinks. If you don't, you have a problem. If you can see hyperlinks, try clicking those links. If they take you to the correct page, this is good. If they give you the wrong page or cannot be clicked, then crawling issues may be introduced when this template is used for the website.
The bottom line is to make sure that the template uses HTML-based text links, not flash or JavaScript. This should eliminate any crawling issues with your website, which is one of the top priorities in any search engine optimization campaign.
| DISCLAIMER: The content provided in this article is not warranted or guaranteed by Developer Shed, Inc. The content provided is intended for entertainment and/or educational purposes in order to introduce to the reader key ideas, concepts, and/or product reviews. As such it is incumbent upon the reader to employ real-world tactics for security and implementation of best practices. We are not liable for any negative consequences that may result from implementing any information covered in our articles or tutorials. If this is a hardware review, it is not recommended to open and/or modify your hardware. |
/ 6 
