1.
E-Commerce
Site Structure
Denver Prophit Jr
Open Source eCommerce Evangelist • www.denverprophit.us

2.
Why Taxonomy Matters?
Open Source eCommerce Evangelist • www.denverprophit.us
Semantic search is a game
changer. As the web makes the
change into a fully semantic
web the biggest challenge for
webmasters lies in beginning to
think differently about how the
web now works and how their
content now connects across it.
David Amerland
Your products are an Entity in Semantic Search.
Your Categories are Concepts in Semantic Search
Hardware Hammers
Lump
Hammer
1

3.
Examples of GOOD & BAD Taxonomy
Open Source eCommerce Evangelis • www.denverprophit.us
Hardware Hammers
Lump
Hammer
Brand A
Hardware
Brand
Name A Lump
Hammer
Brand
Name B
Lump
Hammer
Lump
Hammer
Brand B
2

4.
Examples of Taxonomy Brand Exceptions
Open Source eCommerce Evangelist • www.denverprophit.us
Sports Nike(r)
Reebok(r)
Shoes
Shoes
Well recognized brands will become a concept
that a normal consumer could relate as a
concept. Both Nike and Reebok are both well
known for athletic sportswear.
Search engines build relational databases to
artificially guess your classification relationship
to shoes in the realm of sports wear.
You are still sending
signals about your
classification that all
content below is
about sports
products.
Category pages
should be content
rich and tell the
human and the
machine about the
main category
3

5.
Rebuilding Your Site Structure
Open Source eCommerce Evangelist • www.denverprophit.us
4
There are a variety of methods to change either the URL or the title
of your new ecommerce site structure. The chosen method
depends heavily upon your chosen shopping cart platform.
● woocommerce
○ Rename Category title.
○ 301 Redirect Slug *optional*
● oscommerce, zen-cart, loaded7, prestashop, etc
○ SEO URLs?
■ 301 Redirects
○ NO SEO URLs
■ mod_rewrite redirect query parameters
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