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You may or may not have heard of the ecommerce platform Magento. I have heard a lot of developers and people within the industry talking about this platform, mainly stating its good features and how it is SEO friendly. This has led me to do some investigation work into the platform, to find out just how SEO friendly it really is.

From looking over the platform it became quite apparent that the online community was rapidly growing, with lots of useful information, resources and tutorials available at your disposal.

The admin area of Magento seems very user friendly with tabs laid out clearly to search for whatever you are looking for, making it good for novices as well as having technical areas for the more technical guys.

Advantages

• With over 1,700 great extension to compliment your Magento
• A growing online community of developers is great for troubleshooting and learning
• User friendly CMS functionality
• Create dynamic sitemaps through the admin area
• Enables Server URL rewrites – allowing all your URLs to be SEO friendly
• Ability to edit Meta Tags throughout the site including product and category pages
• Ability to resolve canonicalization issues through htaccess file

Disadvantages

• Requires specifically configured and high powered hosting
• Would not recommend for small stores selling less than 10 products
• Hard to customise unless you are a developer or have a developer at your disposal

Conclusion

Following the investigation into Magento, I would say that there are far more advantages to this ecommerce platform than disadvantages. It has some great features and extensions that can enable your site to become more SEO friendly, and so it comes with my recommendation.

Kenneth Berkley
Natural SEO Programmer

Pretty much all of us have heard of and use one of the big three search engines on a daily basis. Google, Bing and Yahoo collectively make up just over 95 percent of the western world’s search engine market share.

As search engines optimisers we tend to put most of our effort into Google (and rightly so, with 70 to 80 percent of the market share.)

I was surprised to learn that a lot of the ancient search engines from back in the infancy of the Web are still up and running: Lycos, AltaVista and Excite are all still live and claim to be indexing and coming up with relevant results. My own personal favourite, long before Google was around, was Dogpile – and even that is still going.

There are also experimental new search engines, each with their own speciality. There’s the ill-fated Cuil that was launched in 2008 by ex-Google employees. It was far too over-hyped, but does integrate quite nicely with social media. It’s definitely one to keep an eye on.

There’s also Wolfram Alpha, a “computational knowledge” search engine that attempts (relatively successfully) to understand the meaning of web content computationally. As an example, you can enter “population of the UK” and it will return information taken from Wikipedia on the population and other information (such as age expectancy etc.) It sounds like a simple idea, but once the meaning of content can be properly understood by a computer (not just matching keywords and phrases) you can start ranking and graphing data much easier. It would be fantastic if this really took off and became more successful.

Simon Davies
SEO Programmer