In today’s online marketplace which is saturated with numerous Ecommerce sites, it becomes quite difficult to stand out and reach to a massive audience. If you want your products to be easily found on the web, a proper Search Engine Optimization strategy is very important. Many Ecommerce platforms claim to be SEO friendly, but many few keep up with their words. Also, many ecommerce platforms are equipped with only basic SEO features and charge a premium to use them. So, if you are going to launch an online store, how can you ensure that it is capable of SEO and it won’t charge you hefty prices for upgradation to premium SEO capabilities?
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While choosing an Ecommerce platform, there are many SEO ranking factors you need to consider such as Independent Navigation Links, Independent Page Title, Independent Page Urls, Independent Meta Descriptions, Independent Image ALT Tags, Canonical URLs, Integrated Blogging Platform, Social Sharing Buttons and more. In addition to these factors, the cost of the platform and the quality of stock store designs also matter. Keeping all these things in mind, we have chosen the top 5 Ecommerce platforms that are considered the best in terms of Search Engine Optimization. While each of them offers the best of their capabilities, certain features about one platform may be more desirable for you than the other. So, which platform you want to use entirely depends upon your personal preferences and requirements. You would also like to make sure that the chosen platform doesn’t overrun your budget.
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Let’s have a look at the following top 5 Ecommerce platforms that are SEO friendly:
- OSCommerce: It is an open source ecommerce solution which is a viable option for beginners and new merchants heading online to sell their products. As compared to other solutions such as OpenCart and Zen Cart, it is a weak contender because there aren’t many built-in SEO solutions that let you to customize key features of the service such as URL structure, <head> data and other tags.
However, the main advantage of OSCommerce is that its user community has generated numerous tools, plugins and documentation generated for the purposes of improving the SEO. For the new merchants who are willing to learn the necessary code to optimize their stores for SEO, these resources can really come handy.
- Magento: If you are looking for an open source Ecommerce platform with strong Search Engine Optimization capabilities, Magento is for you. While it arrives with a few caveats and it isn’t that user-friendly from a coding perspective, the system does offer the ability to customize URLs to SEO friendly formats and modify <head> data extensively. If you want to make advanced SEO modifications beyond what the platform’s built-in features and plugins offer, you’ll need to hire a professional coder or have experience in development.
The main weakness of Magento lies in its big size which can lead to loading speed issues. In order to account for this flaw, you need to purchase Magento-optimized hosting.
- Volusion: The Volusion is a paid Ecommerce system which offers numerous SEO capabilities. The service offers different pricing plans to meet the requirements of internet retailers at all stages of business growth. Following are some of the most impressive SEO features offered by the latest version of this platform:
- SEO friendly site
- SEO friendly URLs
- Dynamically generated SEO friendly URLs
- Product-specific SEO settings
- Store-specific SEO settings
- Article-specific SEO settings
- Category-specific SEO settings
- Search engine sitemap generator
- Editable robots.txt
- Meta tag keyword definition
- Meta tag title definition
- Meta tag description definition
- Custom meta tag overrides
- 301 redirect management
- Search term analysis
- Custom 500 error page configuration
- Custom 404 error page configuration
The Volusion membership also includes 24/7 professional support service and access to an active support community. Both of these features can hugely benefit new merchants who don’t want to dig deep into the more complex open source ecommerce solutions.
- BigCommerce: BigCommerce is another paid Ecommerce platform that is gaining huge popularity these days. The company asserts to offer “The Easiest Way to Sell Online,” and this is what makes it the most intuitive platform for those who don’t bother learning complex solutions. Its intuitive dashboard, numerous template options, and a wide range of native SEO features make this platform the most desirable one.
- Woo Commerce: Woo Commerce is the most popular free Ecommerce platform, it is a plugin for WordPress. It is not only customize by developer easily, but also for shop owners. Shop owner is able to upload product, manage sales, monitor visitor from the sample content management system, it also able to link up with POS system for their physical shop. As you know there are 10000+ plug in for WordPress, that’s why Woo Commerce is one of the best SEO friendly platform for Ecommerce owner.
As far as SEO is concerned, the platform offers all the essential features as offered by Volusion, with a few key differentiators which include H1 Tags and built-in nofollow support. Unlike Volusion, within BigCommerce, H1 tags are incorporated on the page level. This allows merchants to incorporate product-related keywords in this area availing more SEO benefits. Built-in nofollow support for nofollow tags allows merchants to control how PageRank flows between internal and external links on their web pages. When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, this tag is incredibly useful.