E-Commerce and Search Engine Optimization Team Up for Success

E-Commerce search engine optimization (SEO) specialists Elixir Systems (www.elixirsystems.com), announced today a range of services developed to help online retailers and e-Commerce shopping cart sites maximize profits.

According to the company, 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.

"The majority of e-Commerce businesses are currently using Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising to bring customers to their sites." said Fionn Downhill, CEO of Elixir Systems. "This 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."

According to Jupiter Media who stated at the March 2005, Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference in New York - 6 out of 7 clicks comes from the organic listings as opposed to the Pay-Per-Click listings.

The company's research shows that many experienced SEO practitioners have problems optimizing for online retailers as they lack the necessary programming skills to optimize dynamic pages from shopping cart software.

According to the SEO firm, 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, say from the company.

Elixir Systems sees solutions in:

• Developing web server output filters to enable title and meta tag reconfiguration.
• Implementing sitemaps and other techniques to allow search engines to index the whole content of the site.
• Advising clients on changes to their product titles and descriptions to match the consumers search.
• Developing product feeds to the major shopping engines.

Dylan Downhill, CIO of Elixir Systems, said "Because 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."