Thread: Which is the best shopping cart for SEO

Worried that your shopping cart isn't SEO friendly? Ajay Kumar Singh at SEO Chilli has looked into some of the more popular php/mySQL-based shopping carts currently available to publishers. Criteria utilized for this assessment included each shopping cart's provision (or not) of built-in SEO capabilities, and whether or not SEO-friendly components such as meta tags and descriptions were customizable.

Here's an excerpt of the article:

While choosing the best eCommerce shopping cart for online business website people often ignore the SEO while focusing more on the features being offered by the shopping cart. When they have completed the shopping cart installation, configuration and try to promote the online shop then only they will realize that they are in trouble waters as shopping carts are notoriously bad for the SEO.

So what one should look into the shopping cart Search Engine Optimization? This article investigates some of the most popular shopping carts and their SEO capabilities.

Here's the link:
Which is the best shopping cart for SEO | Search Engine Optimization

Unfortunately, not all of the carts were investigated very well.

Zen Cart does not use Smarty. I've been using Zen Cart for about 2 years. Zen Cart's template system can be difficult to modify, but the upcoming version should rectify this. The best part about Zen Cart is the support from the developers and user community. It is stellar. There are several contributions that deal with the SEO issues.

osCommerce is the most popular freebie cart, but it is so riddled with problems that I would never use it. I call it 10 pounds of crap in a 5-pound sack. The support, other than the conflicting answers from the user community, is atrocious. It is not unusual to find hundreds of coding errors when an osCommerce page is run through the W3C validator. However, from an SEO perspective, it works fine.

I work on sites that use digiShop. If used conservatively (cart and checkout only), it does not create any SEO issues. My main business is SEO, so I look for these issues. I always add noindex meta tags to the actual cart and checkout pages because they hold no value for SEO. The digiShop code is pretty clean and easy to modify.

I have not used any of the others.

The main issue with SEO is with the home page and product pages. Product pages need to have customizable, spider friendly URLs, along with the ability to customize the HTML title tag and meta tags. The code needs to be clean. Many of the carts that I've looked at generate horribly bloated code that is riddled with errors.

Thanks for the feedback, TD. The listing was short which is why I posted the criteria used. I usually don't run across articles on SEO optimized shopping carts. It sounds as though you have some experience in this area.

Wanna write an NB blog post on the topic?

Originally Posted by m42

Wanna write an NB blog post on the topic?

I may do that when I get some time.

I have been working with various shopping carts for some time. The SEO issues for most are easy to resolve. The real issues with any shopping cart selection are reliability and support.

If the cart is not reliable, you better have good tech support.

If the support is unreliable, the carts needs to be reliable.

Ideally, you want both great reliability and support.

Wanna write an NB blog post on the topic?

Would be nice to see what others who have done testing have to say. I have used Zen-Cart for a while and though it was a new world to me I eventually learned how to work with it and love it. Plus like NB the forum Mods and great and always helped me out. Havent been to the forum in sometime but I liked the community so gave another thumbs up for Zen-Cart.