Here's my issue: My client has a website with all of the product categories but the e-commerce application is hosted on a third-party website, i.e. www.mywebsite.com -> product categories -> mywebsite.shoppingcart.com Ideally I would like to centralize everything under www.mywebsite.com which would unfortunately require a different e-commerce application, so now I'm trying to figure out a way of working around this. I'd also like to get your thoughts on whether you think it's worth trying to SEO this third-party e-commerce site or if it's better to start over from scratch? Additionally if we were to start from scratch with a self-hosted e-commerce application, how would we go about creating 301 redirects if the third-party e-commerce site is no longer active? Thanks for any help.
to be honest you'd be better starting off from scratch, with the all the messing around involved and if anything happens to the third party site your SEO work will be wasted. It's much better to keep everything under one domain and in your control.
SEO for an e-Commerce website, is a bit tough task though, i would suggest to optimize the Title, and meta and Description along with quality link building. If you do these things, you can see better ranking improvement. By the way, Does the third party hosted website allowing the image Title changes? If so please do optimize the image alt for products.
actually, having a shop hosted on a 3rd party ecommerce store doesnt affect seo as long as the shop has seo urls. ie (www.website.com/10-pixel-digital-cameras.php instead of www.website.com/product1) however, if u do decide to change to your own hosted platform. its no big deal. keep your current site and then write the 301 redirects. wait for all 3 search engines to permanently redirect your old pages to the new pages. then you can discontinue your old site without a hitch.