Entry and exit pages are the first and last pages that a user sees of your osCommerce store. It’s important to understand that an entry page isn’t necessarily the home page on your osCommerce Templates site. It can be any other page where a user lands, either by clicking through search engine results, by clicking a link from another web site or a piece of marketing material, or by bookmarking or typing directly into the address bar of a browser.
Entry pages are important in osCommerce SEO, because they are the first page users see as they come onto your osCommerce site. Say you’re a pet store. Then you’ll have hubs within your sites for dogs, cats, birds, fish, and maybe exotic animals. Each hub will have a main page — which will likely be your entry page for that section — and several additional pages leading from that central page to other pages containing relevant content, products, or information about specific topics.
Understanding which of your pages are likely entry pages helps you to optimize those pages for search engine crawlers. Using the pet-store example, if your home page and all the hub pages are properly SEO’ed, you potentially could be ranked at or near the top of five different sets of search results. When you add additional entry pages deeper in your web site structure (that is, a dogtraining section to the hub for dogs), you’ve increased the number of times you can potentially end up at the top of search engine rankings.
Because entry pages are important in the structure of your site, you want to monitor those pages using a web-site analytics program to ensure they are working the way you expect them to work. A good analytics program, like Google Analytics, will show you your top entry and exit pages.
Exit pages are those from which users leave your osCommerce store, either by clicking through an exiting link, selecting a bookmark, or typing a different web address into their browser address bar. But why are exit pages important? They have two purposes; the first is to drive users from their entry pages to a desired exit page. This is called the path that users travel through your site. A typical path might look something like this:
SERP -> Home -> Women’s Clothing -> Product Pages -> Shopping Cart -> checkout -> Receipt
In this example, Home is the entry page and Receipt is the exit page. By looking at this navigational path, you can tell how users travel through your page and where they fall off the page. But there’s an added benefit to understanding the navigational path of your users. When you know how users travel through your site, you can leave what’s called a bread-crumb trail for them. That’s a navigational indicator on the web site that allows them to quickly see where they are on your site. This is the navigation path shown on the Wal-Mart web site. You can quickly see where in the navigational structure of the site you’re located.
The bread-crumb trail not only helps users return to a previous page in the navigational path; it also makes it easier for a web crawler to fully examine your osCommerce store. Because crawlers follow every link on your page, this is an internal link structure that leads crawlers to individual pages that you want to have included in search engine results.
