Magento ecommerce solutions for business

Finally, details of our Magento-based ecommerce solutions are online. On top of everything else, this has taken ages to write. Fuse develop Magento ecommerce solutions because it is such a powerful e-business and web marketing package. We find Magento allows us to combine our leading search engine optimisation (SEO) expertise with our design, development and online marketing know-how.

What do you think of Magento? Let us know by commenting here.

Michael Jackson's death takes down Google and Wikipedia

Search volumes described by Google Trends as Volcanic brought Wikipedia and Google Search and News to a halt for up to an hour last night as fans flooded the internet with queries such as "Michael Jackson died" and "Michael Jackson heart attack."

Jackson's wikipedia page had to be taken offline as hundreds of fans bombarded the site with requests to view or update it.

Twitter registered the highest ever percentage of tweets for a specific subject with Jackson based tweets reaching 15% of the global total.

Bing was the slowest search engine to break the story with some people claiming it was hours behind Facebook and Twitter.

Many Google users who searched for news about Michael Jackson's death received an error message which stated

"Your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application"

The BBC news website reported that traffic to the site a 4.00am was 48% higher than average.

TMZ the website who initially broke the story also crashed through shear weight of visitors.

Google PR Update Underway

We are already seeing a number of our client's sites rise in PageRank, but the process seems to be on-going as we speak.

Political Parties and SEO

Who would have guessed that if you look at the number of backlinks each of the four big UK parties have (Labour, Conservative, Lib Dems and Greens) the Liberal Democrats are first past the post with a staggering 8,000 estimated (by Google) links.

The numbers reported by Google (and Yahoo in brackets) are

• Green Party - 2,000 (93,000)
• Conservative - 4,940 (323,000)
• Labour Party - 5,290 (297,000)
• Liberal Democrats - 8,000 (445,000)

All four sites have a PageRank of 7 except for the Green Party who have a PR6. All four sites are using Google Analytics. And all four sites registered their domains around 1996/1997. This is where the similarities seem to end. The Lib Dem website stands out not only by the number of inbound links but also by their decision to use frames across the site. Could this be the reason why today the cached version of their homepage is 4 days old, whereas the other 3 sites have been updated today?

Apart from the title tag, most of the four sites have missing description or keyword tags. One tag which is present on the Liberal Democrat's website is

<meta name="ICBM" content="51.49731, -0.12735" />

This is a geo-tagging meta-tag whose name is derived from the cold war's intercontinental ballistic missile era specifying the geographic co-ordinates of a target, is this asking for trouble? Or are they using the co-ordinates for a UK-wide mapping application of all their regional headquarters?

And finally, the Green Party website is built on an open source CMS system called Modx, which seems to be dealing with the SEO aspects of their site rather well. Definately one to download and try out.

You can find all the four party's websites here
The Labour Party
The Conservative Party
The Liberal Democrat Party
The Green Party

Google NoFollow and Link Sculpting

Link sculpting comes from the idea that a Google spider will not follow every link on every page. Depending on the length of a web page and the number of links it contains, the Google spider will 'get bored' after a certain point and stop following the links.

The link sculpting idea involves placing a 'no-follow' on all but the most important links on a given page.

This way you are encouraging the spider to concentrate on your most valued pages and so increase the amount of authority, page rank or indexibility for those pages.

Unfortunately Google doesn't like the idea of websites controlling the value of their own links.

The outcome is that many SEO companies are expecting Google to start analysing the way websites are using 'no-follows.' Their technology can easily see what percentage of links on each page are 'no-follows' The question is, where will they draw the line between fair use and deliberate manipulation.

Recent turmoil in Google rankings seem to be associated with 'no-follow' links, but we will have to wait and see what Google's purpose is and how they are going to use this data to improve the search results for end users.

Microsoft Bing is now online

Microsoft have launched Bing ahead of schedule. Bing is Microsoft's new search engine, which is to replace MSN Search and Live search.

Try out Bing here

My first impressions are that it looks good, but seems to return exactly the same results as Live. Is it just a re-brand? Or is there something else under the bonnet? Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak was said to be impressed after seeing a preview of the new design and features, but is reserving further judgement until after the launch.

Microsoft have called Bing a 'decision enginge' rather than a search engine and are quoted as saying.

we’re introducing a new kind of search that goes beyond traditional search engines to help you make faster, more informed decisions. It will do this by combining a great search engine (with powerful new features to improve your results for any query), more organized results, and unique tools to help you make important decisions.