Often Overlooked SEO Boosting Shopping Cart Features

We all know the importance of SEO - both on page and off page. And we also know that although organic SEO takes a bit of effort and time, it works. The thing is many merchants jump the gun and move straight to off page SEO and forget about on page SEO.

Surprisingly many merchants are unaware that their shopping cart software offers practically instant SEO boosting features. I use the term 'instant' because all it takes to activate some of these features is to key in a keyword or click a check box, and hit the enter button. How hard can that possibly be?

Granted, entry level carts may not carry these features but those carts in the $50/month range should already contain a few SEO boosting features. Here are 5 tools usually found on ecommerce shopping carts in the $50/month price range that can certainly play an integral part in boosting a store's SEO.

RSS Feed
RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and is an ingenious way for merchants to syndicate content automatically. In order to get the most from your RSS feeds you have to register the URLs with as many RSS directories and blog directories available. That is a surefire way to build inbound links and drive traffic to your site.

Links Exchange
Reciprocal link exchanges is yet another way to build inbound links to your site. Turning this feature on is just a matter of clicking a check box. It would be great if you could exchange links with sites from different IPs. That will certainly help when trying to help with Google rankings.

Articles Directory
Activating this feature allows you to 'thicken' you site with relevant content with the addition of highlighting a targeted keyword.

Internal Linking
This is probably the very basic in back linking. What this feature does is link every page on your site back the main page via your main keyword. If you are going to start back linking, this is the place to start.

Automatic Cross Linking
The automatic cross linking feature is not only an SEO booster, its also a great time saver. What this feature does is automatically identifies keywords used on a page and then links it to other pages. Naturally, you can also do it yourself but can you imagine cross linking 500 product pages with about 2 keywords per page manually? Not going to happen, right?

I strongly suggest using them all these SEO boosting feature for maximum effect, you your shopping cart software has them. Obviously, some are effective than others but together, they are more potent. Once you have got this done, then move on to off page optimization.

Harry Goldberg is a retired ecommerce entrepreneur who has built and sold over 100 online stores. He now shares his ideas and tips on how to make full use of shopping cart features and where to obtain free ecommerce templates.