The Integration Engineer
When it just has to work.

Creating URLs that contain keywords help your site to be indexed by search engines.  A Keyword in a URL, combined with other factors helps a page be seen as relevant to that keyword in the search engine index.

Magento give us a handy way to control the URL for categories, pages, and items.  Sure, Magento will figure out a URL key to use if you don’t supply one.  But we should take a moment to think about what we are saying to the search engine about the page, category or item that we are creating.

Here’s how it works: (more…)

I ran into a recent article that claimed that more people listen to podcasts that use twitter.  I was surprised, and intrigued.  So I dug into the article to see what I was missing.

And I wasn’t missing anything.  It’s a matter of focus.  People that use twitter, (not bots that use twitter, but real live people.)  use twitter in a very deep fashion. They talk about many things.  They follow and re-tweet and use twitter for both a news gathering/sharing, and a social outlet.

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Combining your e-commerce site with social media is something that everyone is doing.  And if you are not, you should seriously consider installing a Facebook Like button on your site.  For most of us, there is nothing but good that is going to come from doing this.  And the technical cost of adding a like or tweet button is really small.

But what about larger organizations?

Again for the most part, if it is done right, it is nothing but good.  But during a recent discussion on user interfaces, I browsed to Bing to see how their webpage compared with Google.  Amazingly, I found that Bing has a line button.  It looked like this….

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Even though 30% of searches are for local things.  Local businesses have a hard time getting found by keyword searches.  Sometimes this is because they don’t have a website.  But more often it is because Google, Bing, Yahoo or whatever, can’t tell if they are relevant for those search words.  So those local customers (customers that are geographically near a business with their product or service) are buying from someone in China or Toronto or some other place while the business in Peoria is wondering why know one ever comes in to buy.

As we customers do more and more of our initial shopping on the internet, businesses that don’t show up on a search are never visited.

My example: (more…)

“If you don’t have a website, you don’t have a business.”

Now let me explain this statement just a bit.  A business is a business when it starts to provide its goods and services to others.  In the past (distant past) people could and would “put out their shingle” to start serving their customers.  Times were simpler then.  And almost all markets were local.  At that time, the act of “putting out your shingle” was all you had to do to let your market know and you were in business.

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