Is your shopping cart software search engine friendly?

• My client is looking for a search-engine-friendly shopping cart? What features should I be seeking and do you have any suggestions on which carts offer the best SEO bells and whistles?

Answer: Evidenced by a statement on their official Google Webmasters Blog, an increased number of Shopping Carts have been instantly rendered more search engine friendly. That's because there is no longer any need to use URL rewriting to optimize long-query dynamic shopping cart URLs.

Google now claims they can easily index all of them; accordingly there is no lost SEO benefit in using dynamic URLs. This had traditionally been a major drawback to carts constructed with .ASP, Cold Fusion, or Perl programming languages in particular due to the dynamic nature of the query strings these programs generated.

The bottom line is that you can feel confident using most commercially available shopping cart software. Nevertheless, there are a lot of options out there. The list below gives you some of the more popular search engine-friendly carts your client may want to consider:

• Volusion E-Commerce — great SEO customizable features.
• CoreCommerce Software — allows all shopping cart pages to be built without dynamic characters and instead with "dashes" — also all pages are W3C compliant and optimized.
• Apple Pie Cart — very popular SEO optimized cart, uses customized title tags, optimized product descriptions, and SEO-friendly spiderable URLs.
• X-Cart — popular turnkey cart based on PHP templates for increased personal modification and product extension.