CrossView Search Engine Optimization for WebSphere Commerce

Get your Product Display pages and keywords to the top of GOOGLE search...

The Goal

Search engines are responsible today for driving the majority of traffic to e-commerce web sites. Company’s can rely on their brand recognition to drive shoppers, but more and more people expect to comparison shop on the Internet. Shoppers start by entering keywords on search engines and viewing the results for the products they are interested in.  Marketing managers, brand managers and individuals responsible for sales of products via the Internet are constantly trying to appear at the top of search engine result pages. Most people know that if you aren’t in the top 5 of the results, there is very little chance that your site will receive a click through.

The Challenge

Dynamically generated URL’s have not been search engine friendly and often result in low indexing rates by search engines. This has presented a problem for many web sites since most pages are rendered based on data stored in a database (product name, description, etc). Search engines often have a hard time with the convoluted set of parameters that come after the host name in a URL for a product page and will choose not to index the page or give it a low rank.

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

http://www.yoursite.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?  catalogId=10001&storeId=10001&productId=32749&langId=-1&parent_category_rn=

Notice the different types of characters that appear in the URL: “?”, “=”, and “&”. These characters make it difficult for search engines to parse the URLs and at some point the URL’s become quite long further penalizing the sites. Most search engines choose not to index. 

One Step Toward The Solution

IBM released a fix pack for WebSphere Commerce to help address the issue. The goal was to boost the number of pages that can be indexed by a search engine by removing the special characters mentioned above and shortening URLs so they became more search engine friendly. The net result was the following:

http://www.yoursite.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/category  _10001_10051_-105367_-2;-105367_products_Cards%20&%20Stationery

As you can see, the question marks, equals signs and other characters have been removed from the first part of the URL, but you are still left with the fact that “/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet” starts your URL after the hostname. This is where CrossView has provided its own enhancements to help boost rankings with the search engines.

Search engines typically look at the first 3 slashes “/” after the hostname to make a determination if the keywords are relevant to the page data. This has made it very difficult in the past for WebSphere Commerce sites to benefit from keywords in the URL because they are always “/webapp/wcs/stores”. You never get any differentiation from any other page in WebSphere Commerce.

CrossView Brings it Home

CrossView took what IBM did one step further. Customers such as, Scholastic, MoMA, Moosejaw Mountaineering and Integrity Media have seen results like this:

  • 100% index rate for products in the online store
  • Significantly higher page rankings on all pages of the store

Lyde Spann, Director of Direct Response for MoMA Retail (Museum of Modern Art) offered this proof:

"In the month of November alone, we saw our referred SE (Search Engine) traffic grew from 7,088 clicks to 51,000 clicks (over a 600% increase)."

How do we do this for you?

Conduct an initial assessment

  • Meet with product management and marketing team, review application review of database and code and determination of URLs
  • Help develop successful keyword strategies
  • Review and compare competitive sites
  • This involves planning what the URL’s should look like, determining which keywords should be emphasized in the URLs and how to manage it with the WebSphere Commerce database.
  • Planning for meta tag maintenance (keywords and descriptions) through WebSphere Commerce, which is very important for search engine ranking determination.
  • Reviewing detailed descriptions about products (the web site copy).

Planning and modeling:

  • This involves determining which navigation paths will be modified to support the URL’s.
  • Determining which JSP’s need to be modified to dynamically build the new navigation paths and making the changes to support this.

Help your production team to install and verify environment setups

  • Assist with the installation of WebSphere Commerce fixpacks required to support the new URL framework
  • Configure the appropriate files to support the mappings determined during the initial meetings
  • Configure the WebSphere Commerce Developer Toolkit to work properly with the new mapping constructs.
  • Test the site.

Find additional information on optimizing WebSphere Commerce for SEO here.