They was a time when doing business on
internet simply meant hanging out your electronic shingle and raking in profits. Then it became necessary to build your online credibility through reciprical linking and membership in organizations like http://i-Cop.org. Then organizations like http://www.paypal.com and http://zzz.clickbank.net/r/?shannan0 became necessary to accept payments without waiting for proverbial "check in mail".One of latest innovations of internet marketing is shopping cart program. Basically, this let's visitors to your site prepare an online order just like they would fill out an order form from a catalog and submit it directly to your business. Some programs are so advanced they also calculate payments, coupons, shipping, and inventory.
But are they a good thing?
Many online business people are finding that fancy shopping cart program they have used to design or re-design their website is costing them business. Why?
Because these programs are not search engine friendly. They omit meta tags, they contain long and cumbersome universal resource locators (URLs), and they inhibit attainment of high search engine rankings.
So what can online business person do? Is there no way to have a friendly merchant environment? And stay visible in search engines?
Yes, there is. And its relatively simple. Take for example, a generic gift site. You might have a front page with a link to main category pages that each flow down like a graph to specific products. But you cannot place each of these pages directly into your shopping cart program. Create a regular front page which sits right on your domain, www.mygifts.com. Create category headings for your main product groupings that also sit directly on your domain, www.mygifts.com/group1.html, www.mygifts.com/group2.html etc. Keep these pages off secure shopping cart server and system. From category heading pages, then move into shopping cart system.
