The most ambitious Internet retailers, hoping to emulate the style and online influence of Amazon.com and other recognized brands, often aim for sprawling electronic retail websites that may look pretty but accomplish little else. If all the push is towards what appears on the front end instead of a concerted effort in choosing a reliable e-commerce solution from the get go, these decisions can ultimately impact the long-term success when it comes to search engine marketing.

Most Internet retailers opt to use out of the box software solutions, eliminating the need to build something more suitable from the ground up. Out of the box software, however, may lack some of the flexibility that is required to implement robust SEO campaigns. On the other hand, building a fully customized e-commerce platform can be outright expensive. In an ideal situation, you will want to look for something that is somewhere in between. To help you bridge the gap, we've identified four major requirements when shopping for a suitable SEO compatible e-commerce solution.

The Proof's in the Code

Ideally, we always would like to have the code available for us to modify, if needed. This accessibility allows us to set up server behavior recommendations as well as change the way that things work or function in order to ensure that they are more SEO effective. Many vendors will not give out their codes unless you pay them a premium, sometimes upwards of $10,000 per site using that code only, and many vendors may be reluctant to allow even that option.

Search engines only care about resulting code, meaning the HTML is sent to the browser post-parse. So, for an e-commerce website to have an effective SEO campaign, the SEO company you've enlisted may need the ability to modify how the software displays the code while the page is being dynamically built. This usually includes any category pages, product pages, or even some of the more "static" pages, such as the privacy policy, site map, and home page.

Customizable Product Administration

Sometimes we run across platforms that allow us to customize certain attributes of pages from the back-end administration, including Title tags, Meta tags, and body content. This is a great advantage when working with an e-commerce solution that does not provide any sort of code access, as that provides the only way for us to "individualize" the hundreds of dynamic pages that may be present on your website.

Occasionally, however, the administration sections are not all that robust, and once we have proper access to the underlying code, we have to develop little code "hacks" in order to get our recommendations onto the website. For instance, when adding these "hacks" to client websites, they often take the form of what appears to be a small configuration file with our recommendations attached to variables. And depending on the page, our configuration file will spit out the proper recommendations for that page, manually adding them where they need to go. Unfortunately, this is usually only accomplished with direct access to underlying code. Furthermore, if direct access is not given, we're often stuck between a rock and a hard place.  

A Linux-Based OS

Until IIS can handle .htaccess files (tiny files allowing a wide range of flexibility for your website),  e-commerce software that runs under Linux is highly desirable for myriad of tasks, such as flattening URLs. Some Windows applications have found ways around this, but they are usually not very aesthetically appealing and don't function as well as a simple rewrite would. Linux, our operating system of choice, is able to run more applications, and the operating system and associated software are much cheaper than its Windows counterpart.

The .htaccess file is a very powerful tool that is becoming more and more popular in the creation of an e-commerce website. Part of its power comes from its ability to "flatten URLs" – for example, it takes http://www.example.com/products.php?id=437 and changes it into something more friendly, like http://www.example.com/products/Yellow-School-Bus/437/. By flattening the URL, we are making it easier for search engine spiders to crawl the website – ridding ourselves of dynamic querystrings, which, oftentimes, the spiders have difficulty crawling. Another good thing about flattening URLs is that the process allows us to add keyphrases into the URL to make them even more attractive to the search engines. And even though the URL may appear different, because of the .htaccess file, it will work exactly as it did prior to the flattening process. 

Another key advantage of Linux is the ability to implement 301 redirects rather quickly. One of the most trivial tasks is to redirect the non-www to the www version of a website (for instance, http://example.com to http://www.example.com), and this can be completed on Linux in just two lines that are added to an .htacess file. Implementing this on IIS (Windows) turns out to be an arduous task that involves having root access to the server, which is not often granted by hosting companies.

Flexibility is Key

Often, an SEO company will need to change how a page is displayed or what is displayed and when. This is where the flexibility of the software comes into play. For instance, some e-commerce solutions provide header, footer, and page templates directly through the backend administration.

However, there are some vendors that prefer to lock away the templates by hard-coding them into the site code. The real paradox is when they then won't give you access to the code to modify these things for yourself. This kind of inflexibility can spell disaster for the campaign.

Avoiding Long-Term Hassles

At this point in time, there aren't any specific recommendations to give on the top performing e-commerce solutions as nothing we've come across thus far is anywhere near perfect. Unless your company has an in-house SEO technician, you'd be wise to engage a knowledgeable SEO firm to avoid the headaches that come with finding out that you've spent a significant amount of time and money on software choices that do not offer the flexibility needed for a successful SEO campaign.

If you end up choosing an e-commerce solution that doesn't meet the requirements outlined above, you may just end up with a half optimized site that fails to achieve the rankings and traffic you've been hoping for.