Understanding eCommerce Platforms from an SEO Perspective

When running an online business, the most important decision is to choose an SEO friendly eCommerce platform to make your online stores easily visible in top search queries. However, creating an online store from an SEO viewpoint is not enough, but the platform should be user-friendly and comprehensible enough to be used by both the site owners and the visitors. Have you ever think, why eCommerce platforms should be SEO friendly or why is Search Engine Optimization an important factor for eCommerce stores?

With the growing popularity of the eCommerce industry in the past few years, it becomes an important concern for all online store owners to make their stores SEO friendly to ensure that their products can be found conveniently in search results. This is a mandatory factor in deciding the success and failure of an online store because if your store is not ranking in search queries, it will lose the opportunity of getting leads and sales from potential online shoppers.

Due to this fact, most of the eCommerce platforms are packed with SEO friendly features to make store management and optimization easier for the store owners. Here is the list of popular eCommerce platforms piled up against each other from an SEO viewpoint:

#1 Magento

If you are looking for the most compatible and user-friendly eCommerce platform with strong features for SEO, then Magento is definitely a good choice over other platforms that offer an open-source environment for developing and managing your online store with latest SEO friendly features. With a remarkable achievement of over 200,000 installations since its launch, Magento is the surely indisputable choice for E-commerce store owners and the credit goes to its flexibility and scalability with an extensive library of current extensions.

Why Magento should be good choice from SEO perspective:

• It comes preloaded with impressive SEO features and it has the ability to generate SEO friendly URLs and keywords to make your online store easily available in top pages of search engines.
• Secondly, the tag of open source makes it comfortable for the owners and developers to make the changes according to new SEO guidelines conveniently and frequently.

# 2 Opencart

Being an open-source platform, Opencart is also free to download and use. Hence, if you are a potential beginner of an online business, then Opencart is an ideal cost-saving option for you that comes bequeathed with a horde of excellent SEO features to make optimization of your online shop easier.

Which SEO friendly features make Opencart an ultimate alternative for store owners?

• The most significant SEO feature of Opencart includes the ability to create a custom category and product pages Meta tags.
• Besides, Opencart has a number of plugins, extensions, and tools created by its huge community of developers for enhancing the search engine optimization of online stores.

Therefore, Opencart could be the perfect choice for owners of startup online businesses as it offers the essential code for optimizing their stores for better search engine performance.

#3 Volusion

Volusion is yet another eCommerce platform that offers SEO friendly eCommerce websites with enhanced compatibility over all browsers. Being a paid platform unlike Magento and Opencart, Volusion includes a variety of SEO features to help the businesses govern their growth with consistency in his cutthroat marketplace.

The set of SEO features that comes preloaded with Volusion includes:

• SEO friendly websites and their URLs
• Store specific SEO settings
• Article specific SEO settings
• Product specific SEO settings
• Dynamically created SEO friendly URLs
• Search Engine Sitemap generator
• Meta tag keyword definition
• Meta tag description definition
• Editable robots.txt
• Custom Meta tags overrides
• 301 redirect management
• Custom 505 error page configuration
• Custom 404 error page configuration

Besides, you can also take 24X7 professional customer care support from the team of Volusion developers for adequate implementation of these SEO features in your online store, which is very helpful for the new store owners when they don’t to learn the intricate open source solutions.

#4 Big Commerce

Big Commerce is another popular paid eCommerce solution that has grown in popularity in the past few years due to the company’s claim, “The Easiest Way to Sell Online”. The popularity of Big Commerce is also contributed by its set of template options, a huge range of native SEO features, and an interactive dashboard.

If you talk from an SEO perspective, you will find Big Commerce as a reliable solution for developing an optimized online store.

From SEO perspective, the features that make Big Commerce an SEO friendly platform are listed as follows:

• H1 tags: You can easily incorporate the H1 tags on the page level, which allows the online store owners to gain SEO advantage from integrating product based keywords into this significant area.
• In-built nofollow support: Big Commerce is integrated with in-built nofollow support. It allows the online store owners to control the flow of page ranks between the external and internal links on their pages. This tag is very helpful when it comes to SEO that provides Big Commerce an added advantage over other platforms.

Besides, Big Commerce has many advanced SEO tools that leaves other platforms with their enhanced SERPs and fine-grain control and they are:

• 301 redirects and URL rewrites
• Prioritized XML sitemaps for auto-feeding to Google
• Tableless themes
• CSS and Javascript files, which are hosted on CDNs

#5 Shopify

Shopify is a relatively new eCommerce platform that although being a paid platform is an excellent choice for developing SEO friendly online shopping stores. Blessed with an extensive theme store and horde of easy to use design features, Shopify offers in-built support for changing the robots.txt file for creating public sitemaps. If you talk about its SEO rich features, the most alluring SEO friendly feature of Shopify is running a business blog that helps in enhancing the ranking of the online stores in search queries.

Other important SEO features of Shopify are:

• It supports customizable H1, Meta tags, title, and SEO friendly URLs.
• It can automatically create sitemaps to show up in search queries.
• It allows social networking integration that helps in social media optimization of your online store.
• The SEO friendly CMS and Shopping cart of Shopify helps in easy optimization of online stores built over this platform.
• Shopify has in-built analytics to help in evaluating the website’s progress.

Are you planning to use any of these eCommerce platforms to create and manage your online store? If so, you can take pocket-friendly E-commerce solutions from several reputed IT companies that manages a pool of talented eCommerce store developers for offering the best services to their clients. However, if you have any other eCommerce platform in your mind that you would like to share with us, leave your views in the comment section given below.