Web stores are usually much harder to optimize then regular web sites . The main reason for that is that most websites are custom while web stores utilize ready script. Thats because web store script, lets call it shopping cart software from now on, has to be much more functional then regular website and the administrator should have full control over the store. Due to that fact, most shopping carts on the market today utilize dynamic URLs which are practically impossible for search engine spider to crawl correctly. These scripts generally utilize single meta data for all of their pages and each page has very little or even no writing at all. This kills almost all chances of ranking high in the search engines. So which shopping cart software is search engine friendly? We will take a look at two shopping carts that are in our opinion much more search engine friendly then the rest in the sell .

X-Cart

X-cart is very good shopping cart software. It is elegant enough for beginners and flexible enough for web developers. It has most of the features you will absolutely need and it is effortless to customize because it uses templates. These features all pretty much standard on all major shopping carts however X-cart is much more search engine friendly. It lets use assign separate meta data for each category (although not perfect, it is better then the same meta tags for all pages of the page ). Software also lets you contruct a static merchandise catalog. This catalog is in HTML with static URLs and is 100% crawlable by all spiders, including GoogleBot and MSNBot. Cost: $185.

Pros: Easy to install and customize. Relatively inexpensive.
Cons: Limited optimization possibilities.
More Info at www.x-cart.com

Prospect Path Ecommerce System

This is much less known shopping cart software but after checking out its features, we strongly recommend it to anyone who is serious about search engine optimization. It seems that this system was make with one thing in mind, search engines. It generates static pages automatically; that means that all pages in your web store are HTML with static URLs. System will also put the title of the product into the name , keywords, description, alt tags, heading, body writing and even document title of that products page! All of this is done automatically as soon as administrator adds a new item. Prospect Path Ecommerce System also includes visitors statistic and ROI tracking. It may track buyers from affiliate programs, text links, banners and even magazines and newspapers (it employs promotion codes to tracks buyers from magazines and newspapers). This shopping cart is very effortless to use but there is no installation wizard at this measure . After the purchase ABC4PC.com (creators of Prospect Path Ecommerce System) will install and configure it on your server for costless. Cost of this shopping cart software depends on the number of features you want but the starting price is around $4,700.

Pros: Amazingly search engine friendly. Great tracking features.
Cons: Difficult to install. Expensive.
More Info at www.abc4pc.com