The following article has been written by James Saunders, Managing Director of Site-Report.com.

In the article, Search Engine Friendly Shopping Carts - The Facts and The Fiction, we described how to ensure that the shopping carts and ecommerce solutions you choose for your online shop or store is search engine friendly, thereby increasing the visibility of your web site, brand and products on the Internet.

Site-Report provides expert consultancy

This article has been written to detail the work that a team of experts undertook with one of the UK's ecommerce solution providers, Lynx Internet Solutions.

Lynx's Evolve Merchant product, although popular, failed to meet many of the simplest search engine friendly criteria. These problems prevented a majority of the pages generated by Evolve Merchant sites from being listed within the major search engines including Google.

However, Evolve Merchant it is not alone in this failing as many similar system also suffer, resulting in poor visibility of product pages and department pages within ecommerce web sites built using these ecommerce systems. Lynx's customers had become aware of this issue and were starting to demand that the ecommerce solution they had chosen was not preventing their most important content from reaching the widest audience.

In a meeting held in London in 2003, leading Search Engine Marketing specialist and Site-Report expert, Ammon Johns, and James Saunders, Managing Director of Site-Report.com, met the technical team from Lynx responsible for the Evolve Merchant product.

Imparting knowledge to help business please their customers

During the meeting, the Site-Report experts imparted the key elements of search engine friendly optimisation identifying the problems that would be encountered by all site that used Evolve Merchant in its current version, and the solution to these problems.

The pages produced by Evolve Merchant suffered from the following major impediments:

• same page title presented for all pages
• same description used on all pages
• query strings with more than two data pairs

Still more hurdles to jump

Lynx Internet Solutions have gone some way to fixing these issues and this should be seem as an improvement by their customers. However, there's still some way to go to ensure that ecommerce solutions provide advice and guidance in ensuring the pages its produces are search engine friendly. For more details of these issues, please see the Search Engine Friendly Shopping Cart article.

A search-engine friendly shopping cart solution should guide its administrators to ensure that what they are entering for each product makes the product page as attractive to both search engines and visitors. Site-Report can offer this advice to ecommerce solution providers to ensure that they, and their customers benefit.

If you wish to know more about how Site-Report consultants can help your business, please click here to contact us.

© 2004 Site-Report.com/James Saunders. All Rights Reserved. Reprint rights by written permission of the author.