Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important area for any website, but it can be an even bigger deal for eCommerce sites. Garnering traffic from a web surfer looking for an exact part number could lead to more sales and new customers, but only if those users can find your site and the exact part number they are looking for.
In Joomla! 1.6 the search engine optimization features were overhauled. They added the ability to have new ways to add meta data and generally improve the way a Joomla1 site is structured.
Joomla! also allows components, like SimpleWeb, to create search engine friendly URLs. So instead of your item pages have long URLs with questions marks (?) and ampersands (&) that are hard to read and even harder to type you can have simple URLs that you can read over the phone to a customer. The typical URL for an item on a SimpleWeb is look like http://www.(YourDomainName)/items/(YourPartNumber)
Using some server techniques, we are able to see what URL a customer is trying to visit and redirect them to a different URL. In many cases we can take a URL that use to show old item detail information and redirect the user (and search engines) to the correct new URL. This way if a user had a bookmark to an older item page they will still get there and search engines will automatically be able to tell when pages have moved and they will change the search results without loosing ranking.
Google, Bing and Ask.com all use one common format called XML Sitemaps that allow a website to display the URL of every page on the site. We are developing a component that will automatically create an XML sitemap for every menu item in Joomla, every category and every item that SimpleWeb knows about.
Plus by putting a reference to this file in your robots.txt the search engines will find it automatically and you never need to so anything about it.
While not exactly a search engine optimization feature, it will help in Google search results. Google Products allows any product to be listed for free in the Google product search. These listings often show up in the third position on a Google Search page.
We are developing a component that will let you register your product feed with Google and they will automatically update information about your products on a set schedule.