Don't Buy Ready-Made Online Shopping Outlet Web Sites Without Investigating Them!

How NOT to get rich with e-Commerce

We just ran an SEO evaluation of a pre-made online store. You know... XYZ Company sets you up with a web site, the products, handles your shipping, provides a payment gateway, keeps records for you, bills you if you sell anything or not. 

Hey! This one even has an automated "SEO professional"! To be fair, I think it was called "Professional Search Marketing Expert" - which sort of offended me, because that's what I am.

This was one of those truly unusual projects that come down the pipe maybe once a year or so. I was absolutely fascinated by the automated SEO professional. But then, that's my area of expertise, so I wanted to know up front if SEO-Bot 3000 was going to replace me any time soon.

Looks like I'm safe for now... but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The Evaluation: The Ten Cent Version

We looked first at the URLs, and you can't imagine all the query strings that were showing up. Odd characters in the "file name" (URL) aren't  ideal, but not unexpected. But in this case it was much worse than you'd like to see. Even major categories of products are run out as queries.

I mean major categories!  Rather than...

 this-store.com/home-decor/candles/?product-id=1234567    I was seeing this:

this-store.com/?category=123456789?prod-ID=123456789

Early on I was thinking that this SEO-Bot 3000 better be fantastic. This site needs fantastic SEO

Undaunted, I open up the source code and look at the meta data. What I'm hoping to see here is a decent description that is relevant to the category and product I'm seeing on the screen, and no more than 2 or 3 keyword phrases.

Alas, the keywords are the same for every page on the site - as if that page with the Home Decor / Candles / sconces and centerpieces (and every other page on the site) is really loaded with content about each and every other major category of products in this store.

Alright now, this is apparently left over from the old days of keyword stuffing, right?. So, how old is this system? I look for a version number, but, ofcourse, I'll either need to log on as an administrator, or go buy one of these sites myself to get that...  

Next I looked to see if important text written to the screen was wrapped in proper HTML tags. Of course, they were not. Everything that isn't wrapped as a paragraph is an anchor. There are no Heading tags at all. For styling large text, the deprecated font-size="4" reared its ugly head.

A Cry For Sanity

Come one guys. You who code this sort of thing...

If your system is smart enough to know when the font needs to be enlarged, you've already got enough trigger to run out a heading tag. And, gee... Imagine using a little CSS to style it! Now wouldn't THAT be cool!

On these pages there is a handy little breadcrumb trail so that Hansel and Gretel can find their way out of the forest. In the breadcrumb trail I can see the name of the category and the sub category and finally the product group.They are, of course, written in anchor (link) tags. That's okay, but not my focus. My point is, if they can write this to the screen, then the information is available... and if it is already there, somehwere in a variable inside the script, use it to write the correct meta data!

Now, e Star Professional (that's the company I own) works with corporate clients whose sites are (in some cases) aging a bit.  Most of them are well established, and they've been online for years.  One of the most  damaging leftovers from their early web development work is the way meta data was handled. Like this terrible e-store, the meta data is the same on nearly every web page in their system.

The fix isn't too terribly difficult, and doesn't involve modifying database schema so long as the correct information is available somewhere in storage. And, what we've been doing there applies to this anti-SEO e-store as well.

We advise them (or do it for them) to break open that old, dingy template and re-write it so that it writes page specific meta tags. In the case of this client's e-store,  reference the category and product by name in the title, description and keywords. That is, write them into the page, inside the appropriate tags, at rendering time. 

The SEO-Bot 3000

After seeing enough of this to get physically ill, it was time to go see the automated Professional Search Marketing Expert.  

Now, I wasn't expecting an epiphany of any kind, and didn't expect Yoda to show up on top of the monitor to tell me to use the force. But I did expect something - and got essentially nothing...

The SEO-Bot 3000 is a form. Yep - a form. A questionaire. It presents itself  kinda like "...if you build it, they will come..." except here you're filling out a questionaire. And, just like the other promise, if you fill it out (or ignore it completely) you still need Professional Search Marketing Services or you're just shucking corn.

This questionaire leads the owner through a series of selections that narrow the keywords from every imagineable product category to a single "specialty", and then locate the store geographically by a few (no more than 5)  zip codes.

Presumably, once you've selected a specialty, picked an area encircling your living room with an 8 mile radius,  and sent XYZ another payment for services rendered, they submit your URL to the search engine of your choice.

I'm disappointed. I've never like giving people bad news, and this was bad news. We won't be able to help her, you see, because they consider their store program code "proprietary", and as such won't allow anyone to  access the files and fix them. There won't be a page specific title, description and keyword combo. There won't be product categories wrapped in heading tags.

Caveat Emptor

Please, people... don't invest your money in anything to do with the internet without  exploring every possible nuance of the project, without gathering information from realiable sources.

None of this is to suggest that every pre-packaged online shopping outlet is horrible. There may be some good ones, some that are in actual fact either optimizied out of the box or at least optimizable.

If you are considering this sort of thing, get a professional web developer involved as a consultant. Any serious web development company could have warned this nice lady that there would be serious issues with this system.

And,  finally, to the SEO-Bot 3000... Is that all you've got???