Search Engine Friendly Web Site

If you want to be found in the search engines you must have a search engine friendly web site. Time and time again we find companies who have built their ecommerce site using URL's which are not search engine friendly. This is quite understandable because many of the ecommerce stores available for purchase are not capable of creating search engine friendly URL's and meta tags.

It's a real eye opener when a search engine optimizer looks at your ecommerce site and tells you it was built wrong and you need to move your store. Yes this happens all the time. You see, most businesses look for inexpensive ways to sell their products and there are hundreds of ecommerce choices on the market. Why would a business looking to establish a presence on the web know anything about needing search engine friendly URL's and meta tags.

What happens in real life is a business does their best to find a good ecommerce store. A designer is hired to make the store look eye catching and awesome. Products are entered with prices, descriptions and photos. A payment gateway is established for accepting credit cards. The site is made secure. Taxes are configured and email addresses established. The store is turned on and voilà, nothing happens. No one ever comes. If you built a store in the middle of the desert would you expect someone to visit.

So now it is time for the business owner to learn about web site optimization. This is the long hard process of getting your products to show up in the top results when someone uses a search engine to find the product you are selling.

You spent thousands of dollars building your store and will now spend thousands of dollars to get it found in the search engines. You can avoid this and just do pay per click advertising but it's expensive and getting more expensive as the web grows.

You can avoid the costly process of moving your store by making sure your store automatically generates search engine friendly URL's and meta tags. Your ecommerce store should not have dynamically generated URL's or use frames. In simple terms the URL should look something like this.

http://www.myecommercestore.com/blue-widgets.html or http://www.myecommercestore.com/blue-widgets.php

It should not generate URL's with lots of question marks (?), asterisks (*),  percentage signs (%), etc.

You do not want you URL to look like this:

http://www.myecommercestore.com/main.php?category=widgets&subject=biography

The search engines like to see static URL's and meta tags. You may hear that meta tags are no longer important but don't believe it. You can find more info on meta tags by going here: Are Meta Tags Important for Ecommerce Products?