When it comes to selecting a platform for your ecommerce site, you have a multitude of solutions to choose from. You need to compare different system features such as initial and ongoing costs, variety of store design options, ability to grow with your business, and quality of ongoing support.

Since search engine traffic is the primary driving force behind ecommerce, you’ll want to pay particular attention to the built-in SEO features that will help get your site indexed and ranked well in the search results. Just remember that these features primarily address on-page SEO issues such as URL structure and title, meta and alt image tags. How you handle off-page SEO such as content and backlinks is still up to you.

The 7 Absolutely Essential SEO Features to Look For in an Ecommerce Platform

• The ability to edit individual page titles for every type of page on your site.
• Support of static keyword-rich URLs.
• The ability to set up 301 redirects as needed.
• Support of canonicalization coding that enables you to choose your preferred domain, and to specify the canonical link for each page version.
• Automated XML sitemaps.
• The ability to create customized brand and category classifications.
• Search-friendly navigation, including the ability to navigate your site without Flash or JavaScript, use of text-based navigation links, minimal use of duplicate and superfluous links, and the ability to edit navigation menus at the individual link level.

The Volusion Platform
Volusion is one of the most popular ecommerce solutions available, and it’s not hard to figure out why. Relatively easy to set up and implement, Volusion offers an impressive array of built-in SEO features such as SEO friendly URLs; dynamically generated SEO friendly URLs; store, product, category and article-specific SEO settings; search engine sitemap generator; 301 redirect management; custom meta tag overrides; editable robots.txt; search term analysis; meta tag description, meta tag keyword, and meta tag title definition.

Designed to grow with your business, Volusion offers multiple pricing packages to match your requirements at every stage of your business development. You’ll also have 24/7 access to a professional support team as well as membership in an active and helpful support community.

The Big Commerce Platform
Billed as “The Easiest Way to Sell Online,” Big Commerce is well positioned to live up to its promise. This ecommerce solution offers an easy to navigate and highly intuitive dashboard, an impressive variety of template options, and all of the built-in SEO options found with Volusion, with a couple of noticeable improvements.

The Big Commerce system allows you to incorporate product related keywords into the H1 tags at the page level, giving you an additional boost to your on-page SEO efforts. In addition, Big Commerce offers built-in nofollow support. This is an important feature that enables you to control how PageRank flows between your internal and external page links.

The Shopify Platform
Another highly rated ecommerce solution is Shopify, which provides one of the most extensive theme libraries of any ecommerce platform as well as an extremely user-friendly design interface.

While Shopify’s SEO suite lacks the ability to create public sitemaps, and does not offer support for editing robots.txt files, it does feature an integrated blogging service. An on-site blog not only enables you to market relevant content that builds and strengthens relationships with your customers, it provides you with the opportunity to rank for additional keyword phrases.