We’ve recently optimised a version of Interspire shopping cart for a client. Going forward the client’s requirements were to manage their SEO in house so we wanted to find a stable shopping cart which is search engine friendly (well… as much as possible) and build on that. We quickly came across Patrick’s review of Interspire so thought we’ll give our first hand review of Interspire shopping cart in terms of its SEO potential divided into available features and those lacking.

Available SEO features

1. Images retain their image name so blue-widget.jpg when uploaded to the product keeps its file name
2. Images are kept by default in a folder level (some shopping carts use a sub-domain which is less effective for SEO)
   
3. Breadcrumb navigation is available by default
4. Basic XML site map is generated by default
5. Under specific server configuration, search engine friendly URLs are available so it will look something like www.sitename.com/products/blue-widgets.html
6. Page titles for products are created based on [product name - store name] and there’s also an option to overwrite the default option and add page title, page description and keyword for each product
7. Site architecture allows the engines to easily crawl the site as it’s based on sitename.com/categories/category-name/ and sitename.com/directory/product-name.html for products
8. Basic Google Analytics integration is present
9. There’s plenty of options to add quality content on a category or product level
10. Featured products rotate increasing the appearance of fresh content
    

Lacking SEO features

1. Product images have no alt text
2. HTML site map is missing
3. There’s no use of H1 across the site which we found very odd, especially for product titles
   
4. While there’s an option to write unique page title and description for products, this option is lacking for HTML static pages as the page title is generated from the file name
5. There’s no option to nofollow pages, unless you’re coding the tag in the template (guess it’s old news now)
6. There’s no real solution for pagination and content duplication issues, such as canonical tag or use of # instead of ? so if you have 2 pages under one category, you’ll face some content duplication issues. We’d expect categories with sitename.com/categories/category-name/?page=<Y> to have a canonical tag back to sitename.com/categories/category-name/
7. There’s no robots.txt file control by default
8. Homepage URL by default is www.sitename.com/index.php which requires 2 minute work in the .htaccess file to redirect to www.sitename.com
9. The ability to redirect the URL of products which have been removed from the site to their main category would have been nice (some default rule instead of using the .htaccess file)

If the people at Interspire manage to add some of the lacking features, it might just be the ultimate shopping cart in terms of SEO.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 9:05 am and is filed under Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.