I made a few E-commerce websites a few years back when I was self-employed. Ranking well in the search engines is very important for E-commerce websites in order to get relevant visitors, and if your site is designed well for converting, visitors into sales, you will make money. That’s the way it goes.

A lot of naive CEO’s and alike, think that you absolutely have to hire expensive SEO consultants in order to rank well. That is *not* true. Instead, why don’t you just spent your time and money on making original, relevant and great content? That’s a true winner.

Though, there’s still a few technical details you have to get right.

Make sure to set a unique page title on all your pages. Use the same text as a <h1> tag on the page.

Don’t screw up your URLs. You will get punished having the same content on those URLs: www.example.com/producs/computers?sortorder=price&page=2 and www.example.com/producs/computers?page=2&sortorder=price. This is called duplicate content, and search engines doesn’t like that. You can use the new canonical tag for telling search engines which one is original.

Make internal links absolute. Yes. You shouldn’t do this: <a href=”/page1.htm”>Page 1</a>. Do this instead: <a href=”http://www.example.com/page1.htm”>Page 1</a>.

301 permanent redirect example.com to www.example.com or vice versa. Allowing visitors to access your page on both URLs, will also be treated as duplicate content.

If you’re moving your website to a new platform, server, technology and your URLs will change. Make sure not to return 404 on the old URLs. You have to 301 permanent redirect the old URLs to the new ones. Otherwise you will lose all your current search engine carma.

I use those two methods to set page information, and 301 redirect:

  private void SetMetaInformation()
  {
    this.Title = PageTitle;

    HtmlMeta metaKeywords = new HtmlMeta();
    metaKeywords.Name = "keywords";
    metaKeywords.Content = this.MetaKeywords;
    this.Header.Controls.Add(metaKeywords);

    HtmlMeta metaDescription = new HtmlMeta();
    metaDescription.Name = "description";
    metaDescription.Content = this.MetaDescription;
    this.Header.Controls.Add(metaDescription);

    HtmlMeta metaRobots = new HtmlMeta();
    metaRobots.Name = "robots";
    metaRobots.Content = this.MetaRobots;
    this.Header.Controls.Add(metaRobots);
  }

  public void PermanentRedirect(string newUrl)
  {
    Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
    Response.StatusCode = 301;

    Response.AddHeader("Location", newUrl);
  }

You also want to take a look at the Google SiteMap.

Create a generic handler in ASP.NET and call it sitemap.ashx. Generate and XML string like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.8</priority>
   </url>
</urlset> 

Take a further look at the importance of sitemaps, if you want to know why you should use one.