Is a different landing page best when you have an online shop? PDF Print E-mail
Written by Peter Dowse   
Thursday, 15 January 2009 20:29

Q.  Could you tell me, talking about e-commerce, how important is to create a different land page (index) for your online shop?. I heard that this is a better practice just because for Google is much easier to crawl a simple html and css web page than a huge dynamic index. Is that true?. How important could this be for SEO?
Rod Hernan 

A. It's true that typically it's easier for search engines to crawl a html website as opposed to a dynamic website. However, there are two things you need to really consider when looking at setting up e-commerce websites:-

1. Site architecture
The way the site is built will have an impact on how effective your SEO will be. E-commerce websites typically suffer from duplicate content issues and sometimes code bloat (where there's more code than text in the site).

I think these two issues will impact more on your site than if you have a html or dynamic landing page.

2. Keywords and content
Making sure you're using the right keyword choices is really important for e-commerce websites. If you can try and imagine your customers' purchase cycle and then choose keywords that you think they might be using when they're at the point of 'ready to buy'. So instead of trying to rank for say... 'blue widgets' you might go for 'buy blue widgets online'.

The other component of your e-commerce website is your content. One of the key factors of e-commerce websites suffering from duplicate content issues is that many online retailers will use the same product descriptions from the manufacturer or wholesaler. This leads to hundreds of websites with the same content on them.

So to answer your question, look at these elements first, then once you have this sorted you could try doing a test with a html landing page and a dynamic landing page and see if it has an impact on your site. My guess is if you follow the two items outlined above, then it won't make much difference whether you have a separate landing page for your online shop.

 
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