IBM WebSphere Commerce SEO

Objective

Search Engines are playing a vital role today for boosting up the sales of products and services listed on the websites. After the popularity of internet, nowadays people (visitors) prefer to shop online. They go to search engines, type their desired keyword and then click on the top result to review and when any company’s website wins their trust, bingo! You got sale; You also won ROI (Return On Investment), the investment you did in your all e-marketing process. Now its mandatory to have an e-business based website if any company requires recognition globally via internet. But for being listed in top 10 results, there are some dos and don’ts have been set up by Search Engines. These rules specifically design for search engine’s robots and these robots prefer static URL rather than dynamic URL to index your whole website in their directories and engines.

The Challenge

Dynamic URL (the URL having special characters or operators such as +, $, ?, =, % etc) is not search engine friendly. These characters and operators make quite difficult for robots to index website pages or give a low rank to these special characters/operators based URLs and prefer the static one on to them.

Here is an example of a usual WebSphere Commerce product URL:

http://www.yoursite.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay? catalogId=12201&storeId=10331&productId=32659&langId=-1&parent_category_rn=This type of URL gets a hard time to be index in search engines and most of the search engines refuse to index and others similar to this URL.

Now you can notice that the question marks, equals signs and other characters have been removed.

How do we do this for you? Overview – Our Websphere Commerce SEO Process

Step 1: Discuss Business objectives
Step 2: Conduct initial keyword analysis
Step 3: Identify the keyword combinations
Step 4: Interim Client Approval for Keyword
Step 5: Baseline Ranking & Traffic reports
Step 6: On-site & Off-site optimization
Step 7: Detailed Recommendation documents
Step 8: Implementation

Involves planning like what the URL’s should look like, determining which keywords should be emphasized in the URL’s and how to manage it with the WebSphere Commerce database, meta tags etc., also includes;

• Comprehensive Website Analysis
• Competitive analysis in Search Engines
• Analysis of URL structure & information architecture
• Analysis of internal linking
• Analysis of source code and page layout
• Code validation
• Search Engine Saturation
• Link Popularity Analysis

Step 9: Monitoring and Optimizing: We provide monthly reporting and optimization recommendations. The reporting is compared to the baseline (or previous month’s results) to identify trends and help guide additional adjustments.

Above all, will assist your production team to install and verify environment setups

Support with the installation of WebSphere Commerce fixpacks required to maintain the new URL framework

Configure the appropriate files to support the mappings determined throughout the early meetings Configure the WebSphere Commerce Developer Toolkit to work properly with the new mapping constructs. Test the site.