Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET: 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. In this chapter we'll work together to build an e-commerce store called "Cookie Ogre's Warehouse." This store sells all sorts of SEO-flavored cookies and pastries.

You'll notice that the site you're building in this chapter is very basic, and highlights only 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. Features such as catalog searching and administration, shopping cart and checkout, product recommendations, and more, are demonstrated step-by-step in Cristian's e-commerce books.

In this chapter you:

• Develop a set of requirements for a simple product catalog

• Implement the product catalog using search engine friendly methods

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.

• A product can belong to any number of categories, and a category can contain many products.

• The properties of a product are name, price, description, the primary category that it is part of, and an associated search ...