E-Commerce and search engine optimization combine to generate impressive results

E-Commerce search engine optimization [(SEO)] specialists Elixir Systems, announced today a range of services developed to help online retailers and e-Commerce shopping cart sites maximize profits. The key is to make sure that the site is found within search engines for individual product searches. There are many pitfalls in this process and it is essential that online stores find a way to be found for their actual products.

ìThe majority of [e-Commerce] businesses are currently using Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising to bring customers to their sites.î said Fionn Downhill, CEO of Elixir Systems. ìThis focuses on the short term and is a very expensive way of doing business. We have clients who were spending in excess of $5,000.00 per month on PPC. Their sites are now highly ranked for their products in the natural listings and they have been able to reduce or even eliminate their PPC costs.î

According to Jupiter Media who stated at the March 2005, Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference in New York ñ 6 out of 7 clicks come from the organic listings as opposed to the Pay-Per-Click listings. The is real news for the e-Commerce industry. The value of organic search engine optimization is unmistakable.

Many experienced http://www.elixirsystems.com [SEO] practitioners have problems optimizing for online retailers as they lack the necessary programming skills to optimize dynamic pages from shopping cart software. Un-optimized dynamic pages are often invisible to search engines. To compound the problem there are hundreds of different types of shopping cart software each of which has different optimization requirements.

Elixir Systems has the knowledge to circumvent these problems by:
ï Developing web server output filters to enable title and meta tag reconfiguration even when the shopping cart application doesnít allow it. These filters have been applied to PHP and IIS with amazing results.

ï Implementing sitemaps and other techniques to allow search engines to index the whole content of the site, even when cookies are required to access parts of the site.

ï Advising clients on changes to their product titles and descriptions to match the consumers search.

ï Developing product feeds to the major shopping engines including Froogle, Yahoo Shopping, and BizRate to ensure maximum exposure for the products at prices far below current Pay-Per-Click prices.

Using these techniques Elixir Systems can ensure that the major search engines index the entire product range and therefore increase the chances that all products will appear in the search engine results.

Dylan Downhill, CIO of Elixir Systems, remarked ìBecause we are one of the few professional SEO companies to actively target the e-Commerce SEO market we have a wide range of experience in shopping carts including PDG Cart, VP-ASP and osCommerce. We can even help you when your shopping cart was developed in-house.î

Additional SEO tools such as paid inclusion (including Yahooís SiteMatch) can be used to increase the frequency of spidering if there is a constant stream of new products to an e-Commerce site.