Monster Commerce’s Efforts to Merge SEO & Ecommerce into their Software

Monte: Yea, definitely, definitely, definitely. So Monster Commerce is, I would say you’re one of the leaders in your industry. Tell me a little about what makes you guys different than the other ecommerce solutions out there and why you are getting so much popularity and so many customers.

Stefanie: Sure, um, well there’s a couple big things that make Monster Commerce special. The first is really our support and our support philosophy…anybody can build great software, but being able to support it and back up what you sell is really where we excel. You know, small businesses need a lot of intensive support when they are trying to run an online business…you know, more than just tech support. A lot of times they need consultation. They need to learn about search engine optimization and how do use shopping search to sell more…how to make their sites convert more sales. And even that is our tech support and our support people are trained to not only just help with the “how do I” type questions, but also really helping people enhance their business and understand all the things that we’re lucky enough to learn through going to conferences like Webmaster World and SES. We try to bring all that back to our clients. In addition, we build our shopping cart and our entire system with search engines in mind from the start. Believe it or not, a lot of software platforms out there don’t think about those things in the design phase. Our developers have actually all been out to Bruce Clay for training. We bring back information from SES and we try to teach them those things so, as they are designing elements of our system, SEO is built in and kept in mind from day one; and it certainly makes our clients’ lives a lot easier when they’re trying to get listed in the engines.

Monte: Now that’s a differentiating factor. I mean do other ecommerce companies have that in mind when they...in their offering?

Stefanie: Well, I can’t say blanket “no”; but I can tell you the majority of ecommerce systems that I have looked at certainly don’t take search engines into account when they are developing. You know, it’s hard enough to develop and code an ecommerce software without doing everything with constantly considering search engines; and we’ve trained our developers about the importance of that. And I definitely think it’s a big differentiating factor for Monster Commerce.

Monte: Yea, because a lot of people, you know, just…maybe it’s my ignorance about how ecommerce works; but, once you get behind the security wall, you know, the http sign, I mean, give us a little bit of an idea how your system works that’s different than others that you can still help with search engine optimization; because once you get into the secured environment when you’re putting credit cards down, tell us a little bit about how that changes the SEO picture a little bit.

Stefanie: Sure, yea, that’s a great question. You know, once you…when you come into an ecommerce site what I call the front end or the insecure parts of the ecommerce site are the parts that you’re actually optimizing and trying to get listed in search engines. Once you click that “check out” button, all of that is a secured area and, in fact, you don’t even want spiders indexing that content. So, you really have to keep it two separate sections of the ecommerce site in mind. The front end, where all of your great content lives, where your product information lives, that’s where you want spiders focusing their time; and then your secured areas, an especially your administration areas, we actually take great lengths and steps to make sure that spiders don’t even see those things. You know, its ah, you don’t want, for example, an administrative login screen being indexed by Google, and we’re careful to make sure that we direct the robots as such from the get-go on our sites.

Monte: Wow, that’s great. That’s great. So it probably goes down to designing how the products and services are laid out on a particular page and the fact that the spiders can go into those particular pages and still have good results when they come out of there that you’re not clogging them up or denying them access to that.

Stefanie: Yea, exactly. What you see with a lot of dynamic sites, and it’s a common problem, is, you know, you get these URL strings that are a thousand characters in length and the search engines don’t like that. It’s key to keep the URL strings clean, not use a lot of special characters, not use session IDs. You know, there are some pretty big no-nos with search engines that seem to always creep their way into ecommerce development; and you know, you can get around those things if you are thoughtful with the development process in making sure that you just follow good, standard search engine optimization with your dynamic pages. Our clients’ dynamic pages seem to get indexed very well and that’s something that we’re proud of. There are some other engines out there that the home page is about all a client can expect to get indexed. Anything deeper than that on an ecommerce site is a lot of [inaudible] out of the question.