Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer's Guide to SEO

Chapter 14. Case Study: Building an E-Commerce Store

You've come a long way in learning how to properly construct a web site with regard to search engine optimization. Now it is time to demonstrate and tie together what you have learned. This chapter demonstrates an e-commerce store called "Cookie Ogre's Warehouse." This store sells all sorts of cookies and pastries. You implement what relates to search engine optimization, but the store will not have a functional shopping cart or checkout process.

In this chapter you:

• Develop a set of requirements for a simple product catalog

• Implement the product catalog using search engine–friendly methods

You'll notice that the site you're building in this chapter is very basic, but highlights the most important SEO-related principles taught in this book. The simplicity is necessary for the purposes of this demonstration, because a complex implementation could easily be extended throughout an entire book itself.

Note

To learn how to build a real-world search engine–optimized product catalog from scratch, and learn how to design its database and architectural foundations to allow for future growth, see Cristian's Beginning PHP and MySQL E-Commerce: From Novice to Professional, 2^nd edition (Apress, 2007).

Establishing the Requirements

As with any other development project, you design your site based on a set of requirements. For Cookie Ogre's Warehouse, we've come up with this short list:

• The catalog contains products that are grouped into categories. ...