The answer is HELL NO, unless of course, you are with Shopping Cart Elite. Let me tell you about the recent events. A customer who switched to Shopping Cart Elite from BigCommerce emailed me a surprising email.
Shae switched to Shopping Cart Elite because he was getting no organic traffic from his website when it was on BigCommerce. Of course, it is no surprise that he had no chance of ever getting any kind of organic traffic because his webpages were NOT indexed in Google.
After going live on Shopping Cart Elite, exactly two days later the website started indexing, and two weeks later the whole website was indexed by Google.
How does this work and what did we do? I will explain all of this in just a minute, but first let me rant a little bit more about our competitors and how you have no chance of achieving organic SEO results with them.
First let me address one thing in case you are wondering why you should care about organic results? According to a recent Wired magazine article, out of 72 million customers shopping on 86 retailer sites, 15.8% of the sales were directly accounted by organic search. Following 11% from PPC, and 6% from email marketing.
So you can do all the affiliate and social media marketing that you want, but you are missing the boat on organic ranking, which is the biggest single source of traffic that can be truly responsible for your growth.
In fact, if you are looking to perfect your Organic, PPC, and Email Marketing technology, then you dont need to look any further than Shopping Cart Elite because we are experts in all three, and we have the technology, software and training systems to support it.
If you are a 3Dcart customer, you will be sad to know that 3Dcart is delusional about your success. After announcing their new V6.0 release, they wrote The improvements mentioned above represent some of the largest in 3dcarts history. And while we strive to make every new version the best one yet, were confident that v6.0 will revolutionize the ecommerce industry by providing a robust shopping-cart solution
So let me get this straight, they spent one year developing a set of features that would take our team three months. The executive team convinced everyone inside the company that the new set of features will somehow revolutionize ecommerce, and now the PR people drank the Kool-Aid and are trying to pass it on to their customers.
So instead of releasing features that will actually help their customers grow such as Sitemap larger than 50,000 URLS and Rich Snippets (both available in Shopping Cart Elite out of the box), they are releasing a way to accept payments for Bitcoins and Dwolla. Yes, both are cool features, but 99% of their customers do not need them and will not use them. How about releasing something uncool that will actually help ALL your customers make more money? Talk about a clueless executive team.
And with Volusion, actually lets not get me started on Volusion. If you are one of their current customers, you know what I am talking about.
WHAT IS WEBSITE INDEXING
First let me explain what everything means in case you are new to this.
The Googlebot is simply the search bot software that Google sends out to collect information about documents on the web to add to Googles searchable index.
Crawling is the process where the Googlebot goes around from website to website, finding new and updated information to report back to Google. The Googlebot finds what to crawl using links.
Indexing is the processing of the information gathered by the Googlebot from its crawling activities. Once documents are processed, they are added to Googles searchable index if they are determined to be quality content. During indexing, the Googlebot processes the words on a page and where those words are located. Information such as title tags and ALT attributes is also analyzed during indexing.
HOW DO WE DO IT TO GUARANTEE INDEXING
We simply following the Googles recommended guidelines
1) Add your URL to Index
2) Add Rich Snippets
3) Add your Sitemap to Google WebmasterTools
ADD YOUR URL - It sounds simple enough but its not. Adding a URL to the index does not guarantee the complete website being index. What it will do is get Google to crawl your homepage and a few top level webpages. To ensure all the webpages get indexed you need a boost of authority domains to link to you all at the same time. Whenever a new client launches we make an announcement on PRWEB, which would normally cost five hundred, but we do it at no charge through our annual subscription with them.
ADD RICH SNIPPETS I wrote a blog post about Rich Snippets recently. Most Shopping Cart competitors do not offer this, and the few that do offer it make it impossible to implement. To implement rich snippets, you must code this on a template level, you will have to modify HTML and CSS code to make it look good, and finally you will encounter rich snippet validation problems along with wrong data being displayed. It will take you thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to implement.
ADD YOUR SITEMAP Google does not have an API to submit your sitemap automatically. So what did we do? WE made an uncool feature which will do it without an API. Simply provide your Google Username and Pass inside Shopping Cart Elite, and it will go once every 30 days and submit it automatically through macros. In addition, we implemented Google Sitemap Index which will support an unlimited amount of URL submissions. If you do not have a Sitemap Index, then you can only submit 50000 URLs at a time.
Finally, there is one more thing. We use a SINGLE proven template that works for SEO, Excellent Engagement from Visitor Behavior, Easy Navigation, and you guessed it, Website Indexing. This template can be customized to any look and feel, but some elements have to be within our framework.
For example, you are not allowed to have any kind of side menus on the product page. It is done for SEO purposes, as well as visitor engagement to have a single call to action.
Now let me show you what happens, when you think you are smarter than everyone else, and do not take our advice about letting us handle the template for you.
Here is a 3Dcart customer (as of 7/13/2013) - www.thebuilderssupply.com, and below are two URLs to two completely different products.
URL: thebuilderssupply.com/World-Dryer-SMARTdri-Plus-K-973P-Automatic-Hand-Dryer_p_58011.html
URL: thebuilderssupply.com/Palmer-Fixture-HD0903-17-Touchless-Hand-Dryer_p_28660.html
Now if you go to Webconfs Similar Page Checker, and compare the two URLS you will get a 79% similarity. If your similarity is above 70%, then you have little chance of indexing one of these webpages, and most likely most of your webpages will not be indexed or ranked high in the search engines.
If you notice this website has unique content on both webpages, but because of the garbage content on the side menus, that is triggering the similarity which is hurting the websites SEO. Thank your Shopping Cart for giving you the ability to get thousands of outdated JUNK vaporware templates so you can get off their back and pay them money, instead of putting up a fight for your interests by making a template that will make your business successful.
CONCLUSION
Sure you can go and start fixing everything I wrote about, but this is one of a thousand things wrong with your Shopping Cart. The other option is you can just switch to Shopping Cart Elite, and all of these problems will go away.
If you want a real technology and software partner with REAL experience whos got your back, and looks out for your interests, so you dont have to know every little detail about the software and technology.
If you want a real partner who proactively does research about issues facing your website and fixes them before you even learn about them.
If you want a real partner who has already implemented thousands of tools and systems to maximize your conversions.
Then Shopping Cart Elite is that partner that you are looking for, and you should partner with us today.