Ecommerce SEO can be a challenging feat, especially if you have thousands of products. If your one who could care less about internet technology but realize its opportunities and the importance of your ecommerce site being ranked on the first page of all the major search engines, I strongly encourage to you outsource SEO to a reputable company.

Experts in this field do nothing but understand the technologies that surround search engine optimization and if you can find one with an in depth knowledge of ecommerce platforms you one step ahead of the game.

Not all ecommerce platforms are the same when it comes to SEO but you can bet that the most prevalent from an active user perspective is the best route to take. These ecommerce platforms have been around the longest, have the best support, and yes – actively cater to search engines. I am going to list the top 20 list makers stated in the Sept/Oct 2007 issue of Practical Ecommerce, and then give my opinions followed by why our company chose to run with the choice it made for its ecommerce seo platform offering to customers.

Totus immediately eliminated all carts that were hosted, charged a transaction fee, and limited the amount of products that you could sell. Please note: Our team did this long before Practical Ecommerce did this study. Secondly, Totus core service offering being SEO and SEM, as you might think ,we casted a sharp eye on which ecommerce carts were SEO friendly. We also looked at ecommerce seo from a site architecture perspective. Site architecture is just as if not more important than being able to optimize pages via static page creation or editing templates. Totus did apply some of it own custom x-cart tweaks that we felt would improve search engine results as well. X-Cart is not only search engine friendly, but incorporates the use of smarty tags which gives your developers full control over every aspect of theme integration and custom module incorporation.

The last attribute that sealed the deal for us was the fact the X-cart is the only shopping cart that we know of that is ISO certified. For those of you that don’t know what this is, a company or organization that has been independently audited and certified to be in conformance with ISO 9001 may publicly state that it is "ISO 9001 certified" or "ISO 9001 registered." In todays time of PCI compliance , and PCI compliance being the moving target that it is, a company that is ISO certified can only assure itself as being a tier one provider in the ecommerce cart market. I personally endured an ISO audit during my tenure as a Data Security Engineer at Cisco Systems and can say its definitely not a walk in the park.

I would like to close stating that this is not an X-Cart sales post. Our company has simply done their homework and X-Cart happened to be our choice of ecommerce seo platforms. Totus offers custom website theme design and integration into its own version of the most ecommerce seo friendly platform, then host and manages it for it clients. Think of Totus as a Yahoo Store provider, but without the Yahoos – we answer our phones and we aim for all the search engines. Our company always prioritizes its ecommerce build-outs from an SEO perspective first, why have a great site if no one can find you. PCI compliance is required by law and Totus offers PCI compliance for FREE to not only its clients, but non-clients as well for a full year!

Before I forget, one the my personal successes I can attribute to "surveys" and "list building". Make sure not to neglect these activities within the ecommerce environment. Your list should be considered a golden egg within your nest.

Survey by Constant Contact— makes conducting online surveys simple, fast, and highly affordable—no technical or market research skills are required. Survey gives you insight, new ideas and the knowledge to help meet customer needs…keep them…and grow your organization. You’ll make more informed decisions—because you’ll have a broader, more representative view of what your customers and members really think about your products, services, and communications.

With Survey by Constant Contact, you can:

• Create online surveys fast, with our step-by-step Survey Wizard—or create your survey from scratch
• Choose from more than 40 professionally-written survey templates—from member satisfaction to testing new products
• Save time—with questions and answer choices written by experts
• Invite survey participants with an email invitation or post a survey link on your website
• Manage your survey contacts with email list management
• Interpret results fast with easy-to-read graphs and charts
• Export results in Excel for comparison over time
• Choose to add Email Marketing to your account—manage your contact lists and reporting in one place (optional)

With your online survey results, you can:

• View summary or drill-down to individual survey responses
• Uncover revealing trends and patterns with Survey’s powerful filtering option
• Create targeted email lists based on survey responses, and then follow-up with relevant communications

Discover how the power of Survey by Constant Contact can help you better understand your customers…meet their needs…and have them coming back—again and again.

Sign-up for a FREE 60-Day Trial today. Explore all the features. No risk. No obligation. Packages start as low as $15.00 a month! Click here to give it a test drive!

For more information please feel free to send me an email troy at totus.us or give us a call 1-210-627-1012.

Or post to our blog! Let us know if you find this post informative.