I overheard a couple developers kicking SEO in the chin yesterday. Well, maybe they were not kicking it, but they were complaining about a client making a request to change a link that appeared on their site. A link that pointed to a product page. The general complaint was that changing the link would alter the appearance of the page such that the link would not look as cool on the page as it currently does.

I’m one to think there is a trade-off between look and feel on a site and pure SEO needs. Lately however, I have been reading up more on conversions and actually calling users to action on a website. So my adjusted thinking of late with regards to the particular conversation I overheard is, if you do the SEO right, the user will never see the “uncool” link on the page these developers were talking about. If the SEO is done right, the user will land right on the product page that was pointed to by the link.

If the SEO is done right, the user will come directly to the product page, where it only takes one click to start the purchase the product. The truth is, if you want to sell products, you need the user entrance page to be the start of the purchase process. Every page a user has to go through before they can start the purchase process is another page that they can choose to leave the site.

E-commerce sites are not about being cool. E-commerce sites are about selling products. Yes, cool can make your customer think your site is very professionally done, but it only takes a few seconds to think of all the cool looking stores that are no longer in business. Get the user on the product page as quick as possible and make the sale.