Shawn, Have you ever thought of writing a shopping cart? You know one that is naturally "spiderable" (or out of the box) so to speak. I am sure since we've all built sites with shopping carts in them we could all pitch in and have some good ideas and features that would be inherant and not just a mod or hack for the shopping cart. There don't seem to be any good shopping carts with the right options and search engine optimization, or good design for that matter, in mind. I know I haven't found one, or at least one in a reasonble price range. I seem to not even consider shopping carts that are too much money like $500 and above so I guess I'm not an expert on it. Just wondering. Oh and PHP would be my preference.
Yeah, Shawn, and while were at it, I want a pony. Make me a pony out of php...hehe. I'm just kidding, but I was wondering about shopping cart spiderability. All of my product pages are created through my admin section and I was wondering if there is anyway to optimize them?
Are the pages themselve static? If they are then optimization is the same for them as any other page. 1. A good title. 2. Some content text and the proper use of <h> tags 3. Proper Internal linking so the bots can find the page. 4. Backlinks to the page using the right anchortext. The fact that the products my differ from time to time is probably a good thing. It gives the page freshness.
osCommerce is a great free shopping cart system. Could probably use some spiderability hacks though. I modified it and made http://store.digitalpoint.com/ (although I never actually got around to opening it up to the public). - Shawn
yeah, I know it's "asking" for a lot, but I don't mean to say it to be bossy, or tell you what to do, it's just something I'd do if I had the mad programming skillz and it wouldn't take me a year to make. eh. <edit>oh and I don't mean make it free, I'd totally expect to pay for it.</edit> From what I've heard osCommerce is good and free and all, but isn't all that flexible. At least out of the box you have to have the same Title, Keywords, and Description on all the pages. SEO no no #1. ( I notice that the digital point store has the same title on every page.) The design is very inflexable (is it unflexable?) to where it's pretty much their layout, or a lot of work changing every file. Their instructions (could be valuable SE and user content) don't help much, and if you actually follow their direct instructions you will break your site/do it wrong. So you have to find a different tutorial/instructions from a completely different site to actually install it correctly. I think there is more, but that's all I can remember right now. sorry it's friday night and I drank and watched Repo Man with my wife. oh boy, party central! it sounds like your not all that interested, so I will drop it, but if you do ever think about it, I'm down for writing up some suggestions. I just wish I was good at programming, hmm maybe someday I can learn more. thanks for replying though.
osCommerce is fantastic, it spiders just fine most of the time. (only problem being it is hard to Mod the titles.
I know you didn't make the shopping cart suggestion to be bossy, it's probably good that Shawn gets so many suggestions (who knows which will be the next big money maker ). My wishes for a php pony are really more of a poke at Shawn's programming skills...The guy can make anything, quicker and better!
All you need to do is apply some good mod_rewrite conditions and rules and OsCommerce will be good for Google.