by John McKown, President of Delaware.net | November 25th, 2009
Today, Delaware.Net launched a feature for our Content Management System (CMS) and our Ecommerce engine (www.store-logic.com) that will make websites come up higher in search engines, and that will make traffic reports much easier to read.
This feature is called “Search Engine Friendly URLs”. This feature has existed for years is software like WordPress, and some of the other open-source CMS solutions on the market. Our CMS and ecommerce systems come turn-key with a more stable and complete set of features than many of the open source CMS solutions available, but we were lacking in some of the search engine and social features. Now we have them.
This new feature has been deployed to all of our servers that are running our Team-Logic CMS software, and our Store-Logic 2.0 Ecommerce software. Customers whose websites were built prior to August 2008 will need a minor upgrade to their websites to take advantage of these new site management platforms. There are over 200 new features in the CMS and Store-Logic 2.0 engines over previous versions.
How the new URL Feature Works
First, lets look at a problem that has existed with the page URLs that our software has produced in the past:
If you have an older online store, your category pages probably has a URL that looks like this:
http://www.somestore.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=catalog.catalog&catId=77
If you look at that URL closely, you will see that it has variables at the end that tell the server how to build the page. This is a dynamic URL, because the variables can change. For example, look at the end of the URL and you will see “catId=77“. What that means, is that this URL is getting a category from the database of store categories to build this page, and it is category number 77. This is simple for programmers and computers to understand, and the page gets built instantly on the fly. The problem is that search engines don’t trust pages that change frequently, but they do index them. So if this URL looked different, it would be easier for search engines to trust the page and it could potentially come up higher in search results. If search engines index words in the URL, this page would also suffer because it has a category ID number instead of the category name.
Another problem with this URL is that tracking your store’s category performance in your traffic reports is very difficult to read unless you know what “category 77″ is. If you sold shoes online, it is a lot easier to read a report that says “The Nike shoes category got 1000 pageviews last month” instead of “Category 77 got 1000 pageviews last month”.
Our new Search Engine Friendly URL Builder feature solves both of these problems.
Now you can make URLs that look like this:
http://www.somestore.com/shoes/nike/jumpman-classic/
Just from looking at this new URL, we can tell what the product is. It is a Nike shoe, and the model is “Jumpman Classic”. Since the URL can actually be sculpted for PRODUCTS AND PAGES, it is possible to use this technique not just on categories and products, but also on customized landing pages in your website. This is very powerful stuff because Google looks at over 200 different elements of your web pages to determine what terms your page relates to. Google also just announced that they will be using the SPEED OF YOUR SITE as a ranking factor after the first of the year.
To summarize, here are several of the new Search Engine Optimization (SEO) features in our latest software versions.
- Search Engine Friendly URLs in Ecommerce Product Pages
- Search Engine Friendly URLs in Category Pages
- Search Engine Friendly URLs in CMS Pages
- Custom Page Titles in all CMS and Ecommerce Pages
- Tagging Engine – add cross-linked search tags to any page or product, works throughout your site, mimicking a blog page
- Link Titling – all links, navigations, and embedded navigations have hover text built-in
- Google Sitemaps – All websites running on Team-Logic CMS and Store-Logic 2.0 will generate a Google sitemap file automatically. You will need to register this file with Google to make it work.
- Google Site Search – Google site search is now built into our CMS.
- Google Base, Google Shopping – you can now deploy your products to Google shopping from our Store-Logic 2.0 Engine.
- Sitemap Generator – Our CMS and Ecommerce systems generate a sitemap page automatically.
- Twitter feed push from our CMS.
Call our office for a free site review to see how we can make your site easier to manage, come up higher in search engines, and make you more money.
